HopAlong
The Travel Network for IITR Students
Created on 12th October 2025
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HopAlong
The Travel Network for IITR Students
The problem HopAlong solves
Many IIT Roorkee students want to travel during breaks but struggle to find trusted companions. Even when they do, planning becomes messy with scattered messages, unclear commitments, and no central place to organize details.
HopAlong solves this by offering a secure, IITR-only travel companion platform. Students can create or join trips, send join requests, and chat in real time — all in one place. The platform verifies users via college email, ensuring safety and trust.
With automatic seat tracking, clear trip details, and smart filters for destination, date, and budget, HopAlong makes trip planning smoother, safer, and far more organized for IITR students.
Challenges we ran into
Getting Socket.IO to work reliably was my biggest challenge, messages were arriving out of order, and users sometimes missed notifications. After hours of debugging, I fixed it by restructuring how users join trip rooms and setting up proper event listeners on both client and server sides.
Another hurdle was IIT Roorkee’s multiple email formats (@ch.iitr.ac.in, @mt.iitr.ac.in, etc.). My initial validation only allowed the main domain, which would’ve locked out many students. I solved this by researching all departmental patterns and writing a flexible regex that accepts any IITR subdomain.
Keeping the UI in sync during join request approvals was also tricky seat counts, request statuses, and notifications all needed real-time updates. I combined optimistic UI updates with Socket.IO backend events to ensure everything stayed consistent. So this integration felt so tough.
I also faced issues with JWT token persistence users were getting logged out after refreshes. I learned to use Zustand’s persist middleware properly and added Axios interceptors to automatically attach tokens to all API calls.
Tracks Applied (2)