Alpha Q

Homepage
Signup page
Forum page
Pop-up dialog box of how to create a post in the forum
Info page of an example post, with the telegram handle of the poster, as well as a picture and a short description of the food
Map page with Google Maps, as well as links to each of the posts made in the forums

Write up

Theme: Environment Problem Statement: In 2019, Singapore generated around 744 million kg of food waste. How can we tackle this growing problem and encourage Singaporeans to cut down on unnecessary food waste?

What it does

FoodShare is a proximity based platform for users to share their excess food with others living in the same neighbourhood, reducing avoidable food waste while at the same time providing food for those who need it. Using FoodShare, residents will be able to choose from different residential areas to see listings for excess food.

**Ideally, listings up to 1km away from the user would be shown as this allows for: Easier pickup, more convenient for users & earlier pickup Establishing a sense of community

When creating FoodShare listings, users are required to take photos of their leftover food, so as to allow interested parties to judge the quality of the food before getting in contact with the food provider. Then they will be able to upload pictures of excess food that they have. Interested parties can contact the giver to get the food from them at no cost, with the collecting side having the ultimate decision of whether or not to take the food so that it wouldn’t become a trash service. Food sharing encourages Singaporeans not to throw away their excess food ingredients, instead sharing with those that may require certain food items. This also allows Singaporeans to be more mindful of buying extra food while grocery shopping, playing a part in reducing potential food wastage.

How we built it

This hack is built on ReactJS, with Supabase as our database.

ReactJS is a simple and flexible web development tool with many libraries available to aid us in our web app development. It also allows for building of a Single Page Application (SPA), allowing for seamless user experience. ReactJS also provides modularity, with customizable components that can be repeatedly used throughout our web app. This was also relatively easy to pick up and learn for us, as many of us have not touched ReactJS before.

Supabase is easier to set up and maintain compared to manually building a database, which would not be very feasible for a 24 hours hack. It includes useful features such as row-level security and authentication that is useful to our hack. In our hack, we mainly used Supabase to store information about our posts, including the images.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges for most of the group was the lack of familiarity with the programming language. Most of us had neither learnt Javascript nor html prior to the competition, thus most of the skills and implementations on the website were mostly learnt on the fly. Regardless of the competition’s outcome, we are happy to say that we are proud of our first ever website.

Another challenge we had faced was trying to come up with a way to make our app stand out from other existing apps on the market. We were aware of apps such as Olio, which even extends to beyond food wastage. However, we were thinking that having a distance restriction would actually help with encouraging users to use the app. Our original idea even restricted it further to perhaps residents living in the same block; the notion of simply going to a neighbour just beside, above or below you was the sort of Kampong spirit that our grandparents had when it came to sharing food, not letting food go to waste whilst looking out for our neighbours.

Our idealistic thinking perhaps is another difficulty that we encountered in our early planning for the hackathon. An early idea prior to FoodShare was the setting up of group pantries within blocks through the app. However, our concern was that residents may take advantage of the goodwill of others and abuse the system. Perhaps in a (hopefully!) near future this idea will become more feasible.

What we learned

Our biggest takeaway from Lifehack 2022 was getting to know ourselves better. We learnt to be more resilient despite our shortcomings, and we feel that we would be able to carry on this spirit of tenacity in our studies as well as our other commitments.