Inside Scoop on my Final Project at Boca Code

As a software engineer majoring in marketing, I have always felt passionate about user experiences and trying to find solutions to facilitate everyday life. I was fortunate enough to become a homeowner this year and during that time I underwent several home projects in which I had to reach out to electricians, contractors, and plumbers for quotes. During that time, I discovered a problem and niche that deserved more attention and used my idea to curate an app that met my final project's requirements.

Biddit — A social platform for local businesses and their community to connect for all their project needs.

During the last two weeks of my Bootcamp, my cohort was tasked with coming up with an idea we each pitched to the instructors with a Pitch Deck that met the requirements of:

• Full project completed in our own code.
• Built our own database and API.
• Deployed frontend using React.
• Users can react on the Front-end and the changes made would directly affect the database.
• Front-end would need to reflect user changes.

Problem

When coming up with the idea for my project, I analyzed some of the biggest issues with the surplus of businesses to reach out to when starting a home project along with the surplus of information on the internet to sift through to make an informed decision of which company to choose from that met the two of the principles of the iron triangle.

Iron Triangle — Source

Some of the main issues I found were that due to changing prices depending on different factors for some companies, a good chunk of them didn’t have upfront pricing on the internet, how expensive advertising costs can be, and the limited time businesses have to give quotes. This could be a little chaotic when trying to decide with the magnitude of competition out there for a lot of customers and with a generation like mine where we prefer quick answers on the internet rather than having to call around I found this could deter a lot of potential clients from even making that first call.

Then you have to consider the expensive costs associated with promoting your business to be on the top of a google search or the other costs associated with advertising the business either by print or social media. You also have the expense of time for businesses to come onsite to give proper quotes to convert those calling in for quotes into customers. Finding a solution that can tackle these problems heads on was what I set out to do with Biddit.

Solution

Creating a platform that displayed what this niche was missing was what I set out to accomplish with the creation of Biddit. By having the user have the ability to share details of the project the client now has transparent pricing and knowledge to make a good decision for their projects, gives the businesses the ability and time to bid on more projects virtually, and a way to connect with the community to utilize an advertising approach that was based more on word of mouth.

The Tech Involved

This app was created in 2 weeks using a FERN stack. I created my database in Firestore, API using Node/Express, and Deployed the project on Firebase Hosting as a single-page application in React.

One of my favorite parts of this project was that I created a mockup of the design of the app using Figma and executed it all using Pure CSS.

At the end of the project, our class was tasked with presenting the project to everyone along with some guests at Boca Code. To watch the recording of the presentation along with the Demo, click the link below.

Contains the recording of the full presentation at the end of the 2 weeks along with a live demo.

Lessons Learned

Some of the main issues that I faced with this project was having to avoid scope creep. Due to the fact that this project I felt personally invested in this due to my own experiences, I wanted this to be everything the world could possibly need. It was during the initial Pitch Deck of the project that I was able to best organize my thoughts and focus on meeting the requirements of the project and building out a list of features and things I could do in the future with the project but stay focused on the task at hand during the 2 weeks.

Future Roadmap of Biddit

I also had to find a way to self-manage myself and I used a project management tool (Jira) to organize the tasks I wanted to be completed on each day along with the SCRUM practices of daily standups and retro with the rest of my cohort.

This was such a great passion project for me because it was one of the first projects where I was able to display not only my technical knowledge but presentation skills and organization skills.

Thank you for reading about my experience doing this final project at Boca Code! Follow me to read more on my journey in tech.