SwapSpot

Overview

SwapSpot was a coursework project that turned into a more substantial build than I'd planned. The brief was a barter or buy-sell platform, and most groups would have shipped a basic listing page. I wanted to use the project to actually exercise transaction workflows and real-time chat, because those are the parts that decide whether a marketplace feels alive.

What I built

I worked on the Django backend - listings, user-to-user transactions, and the chat workflow that lets buyers and sellers coordinate in real time. The data model had to handle the awkward shapes that come up in barter - one item being offered for another, multi-item trades, partial agreements - without forcing those interactions into a rigid buy/sell schema.

Technical decisions

Django was a good fit because it gave us auth, admin, and ORM for free, which let me focus on the parts that mattered. Real-time chat went through WebSockets layered on top of Django Channels. PostgreSQL handled the relational data. I kept the chat persistence model intentionally simple so the team could ship on time.

What I learned

This was an early lesson in scoping. The original feature list would have taken twice the time we had. Learning to cut features without losing the demo's central narrative was harder than the technical work. I came out of it with a much better sense of what "minimum viable" actually means when there's a deadline.