Roof

In the summer of 2015, following my Freshman year at UNC, I used to meet my friend Teddy at the coffeeshop to work on programming together. While I was working on websites for my freelance business, he was teaching himself Android development for a small project his friend Joao had started called Roof. Roof was a platform that helped roommates keep track of responsibilities, and it was born out of personal need: Joao (as well as me, Teddy, and most of our peers in Carrboro) lived in a house with 3 or more other people. Later that summer, after meeting Joao, I expressed interest and was graciously offered a spot on the team.

I joined Roof with a background in static websites built using HTML, CSS, and a little PHP. My only familiarity with Javascript was from the pre-built plugins I’d used on my websites for image sliders and accordion boxes. At Roof, I was given full responsibility over the app’s web platform, which we decided to start building using AngularJS (Angular 2 hadn’t been fully released yet). Over the course of a semester, with the help of my talented friends, I learned about Git, REST, Ajax and single-page web frameworks, designed an interface without a CSS framework, and had a beta version ready for launch early in 2016.

When I joined Roof, our plans for monetization were vague, but one idea was to launch a platform for property managers who were interested in collecting rent from their college tenants using an app. Development of the property management system began less than a year after I joined. Our team experimented with different payment processing APIs, and our roles expanded: Teddy and I began to work on Roof’s backend alongside Joao, who had previously been responsible for the entire backend as well as the iOS client. The three of us, joined by our designer Tyler, had frequent discussions about project architecture and interface design which lasted for several hours.

Working at Roof was the most broadly educational and community-oriented experience I’d ever had. Our team Slack became a melting pot of conversations about programming, interface design, user experience, music, philosophy and so much more. Working with such an intimate team fostered powerful feelings of both ownership and responsibility, and our work together became something intensely personal.

I stayed with Roof until April of 2018, when the time commitment required for such a large endeavor with so few teammates had become both emotionally and financially unsustainable.