A goods-exchange webservice based exclusively around bartering.

I feel I should preface any examination of this project with the context of its creation and why it's now up here on github. SwapSpace was my first ever coding project. I had just finished first year computer science and my first co-op position had completely blown me away by showing just what was possible with webservices and giving me broad perspective on how they worked. So as the new semester started I set out with four csc courses and one co-op job under my belt and aimed to build my first full fledged web service.

Looking through the code now it's painfully obvious how little I understood about design patterns, system architecture, and general best practices, but I'm still proud of what I built. Although I never launched it, in it's current state SwapSpace is more or less functionally complete, albeit with more than its fair share of bugs and about seven thousand lines of spaghetti code. What originally stopped me from putting it up online was its pressing need for a complete aesthetic overhaul, which at the time seemed beyond my capabilities. I still like the idea, but at this point I'd have to go back and start from scratch, which I'll save for some time I'm not trying to finish my degree.

I put this project up here because as I'm starting to seek employment I think it's important to demonstrate my passion for coding and my follow through on their creation. I feel like this project was one of the greatest learning processes of my degree, with hundreds of hours poured into coding and learning. I hope it can be judged more for the effort a younger, more ignorant me put into it, rather than the pretty awful (at times) code that I ended up writing.

Thanks for reading.

SwapSpace is a exclusively barter based goods exchange website. Its core idea is of users each having their own storefront, where other users can visit and propose trades for sets of goods from both parties. After counter-offering back and forth and eventually arriving at a mutually agreed upon proposal, the users are then provided with channels to communicate and coordinate the exchange. SwapSpace is designed to provide a complete and full featured ecosystem for users to interact within, providing a messaging system, bulletin boards for users' stores, rss subscriptions for specific searches and users' uploads, and location based services to help users find options within their travel range.