Collaboration with Sara Sánchez
Finding good apartments in Taipei is tough! The best listings are all in Mandarin and, even if you can read it, the websites are difficult to use.
Google translate often fails and interfaces are hard-coded with text values that don't work in their translated form.
Recently designer Sara Sanchez and I were trapped inside by a typhoon, so we made a little tool that lets you search Mandarin real estate listings using English.
Fun stuff: 1. Search by proximity to any station in the Taipei MRT/Subway system 2. Search by proximity to universities and schools 3. Search the most common room configurations, including private suites or rooms subleased in people's houses
The interesting part was reverse engineering the APIs for the source data, to figure out how we could map English queries onto the various Mandarin categories.
Every search permutation was represented by a number and a cryptic category name, so there was a lot of trial and error with spreadsheet in hand.
Built with: React and a single 1000-line serverless function (AWS Lambda), Clay Base.