CartFresh

Inspiration

This project has been inspired by some online shopping portals like Mercadona or Glovo, but adding a real-time user interaction. This project allows people to go shopping virtually without sync problems or products lost, creating a rich user experience.

What it does

CartFresh is a collaborative shopping web app that syncs with other devices on the same room session. Users experience instant updates whenever a user in the same session changes something. The actual problems that we discovered from actual online services for buying products are:

Inefficient:: Pages are sometimes confusing, unsorted or unorganized.
Not user-friendly: Is commmon to see services that have complex options (advanced) that requires a higher learning curve. The idea is to simplify the user's problems as Amazon does: with only 1 click.
Not updated in real time: In a traditional shopping cart, if one users is buying and adds products the other user can't see them unless he manually refreshes the page. What if one users checks out the shopping cart without syncing the products, well, you end up not buying what you wanted!!

How we built it

Tech

CartFresh is developed with state of the art technologies. A node.js powered backend and Vue.js frontend. The database uses Heroku Postgres DBaaS.

Backend

Our real time API is developed in node.js, using a model-route-controller-services code structure.

Frontend

The Vue.js frontend is developed with two simple views, each view has two components. For styling we make use of a CSS framework, tailwind.css.
To consume the API, front and back is connected via a promise based HTTP client, Axios, directly integrated in Vue.js.

Challenges we ran into

Problems

Deciding what project to do was tough, we started another two projects because of our curious minds, not focusing our efforts in finishing one challenge, but the end goal was accomplished: coding for fun as a team.

Teammates background

Having different levels of experience and areas of expertise within the team was challenging at first. In the end it created a sinergy, people for infra, backend and frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Restarting the project twice and finally having something. Persistence to finish.

What we learned

Saving time using DBaaS instead of deploying and managing our own DBs. DBeaver to create tables and populate the content.
Teamwork, we managed to coordinate our efforts, even if we had to restart our projects.
Version control, how to delete a commit in git 😁.