/Herder

Herder

Started on 04/12/2021

An automatic roommate discovery tool that matches people based on their answers to specific questions.

Heroku

Node.js

PostgreSQL

React

Vercel

Details

What is it?

Herder is a website that automatically matches possible roommates that have similar answers to the questions they answer.

How does it work?

When a user signs up they answer all the questions they want to in their profile, and assign a priority to each question. Then the user can go to the search tab and search by graduation year and pronouns. This will return a list of all the users that match those parameters, ranked highest to lowest by match percentage. Match percentage increases the more questions both of them answered similarly. Priority is a multiplier applied to each question percentage. It works on a 1 - 3 scale and the closer their priorities match, the closer the multiplier will be to 1.

Why did I make it?

The road to college has an uncountable amount of pit stops. One of those is picking a roommate. When I committed to WPI I got right to work figuring out all I could the roommate process. It was definitely on the top of my mind. I joined the WPI Class of 2025 Discord sever. After a while on there I discovered the #roommate-search text channel. I wrote a little bit about myself to see if there was anyone I could room with. I didn't have any luck, and others didn't seem to have much either. The whole thing was a little disorganized.

So I wanted to fix the problem. In a day or two I threw together a initial prototype. I worked with everyone on the Discord server to make sure Herder met everyone's needs. I created a Google Sheet where anyone can suggest additional questions to add. I continued to add more features as people requested them, and built on top of existing ones. In under 24 hours after launch Herder received close to 100 users. When Herder hit 200 users on May 12th, 2021 I made a little promo video.

Nov 28th 2022 Update

I had to take down the project because it was using Heroku's free tier and they discontinued offering it. The code for Herder is available on GitHub, and is fairly well documented. It's only missing the database schema, I might add that later. (it's in my todo list)