Triton Marketplace
With items sold and sought for by UCSD students split across multiple platforms, my team in UCSD ACM’s Hack Projects set out to create a website where students can post their buying and selling needs. Only those who have been verified to be affiliated with the school can access the site, creating a more secure environment for trading with the removal of anonymity. This was achieved through the MERN stack, with our team split into frontend and backend developers. I was responsible for the backend team and delegated tasks regarding it.
A challenge I faced in creating the project was the verification system. After consideration, we decided to have students verify their enrollment at UCSD by signing up and logging in with their UCSD email, which only students, faculty, and alumni should have access to. I implemented this feature, initially using NextAuth in order to use Google’s authentication API. However, in order to achieve a clean split between frontend and backend files, I ultimately decided to go with Passport OAuth. With the OAuth, users attempting to log in are directed from the Google sign-in page and then UCSD’s SSO page, adding an extra layer of security before being directed back to our app.