Inspiration
My inspiration was my own personal experience with trying to purchase products for my curly hair - there are very long lists of dangerous chemicals to avoid that many companies use. It’s not very convenient to have that sort of list memorized, or stare at the shampoo bottle in the middle of the store aisle
What it does
The application, as it stands, does not have most of the features I intended for it. However, the planned application was going to have two sections - a guide and a product scan. The product scan would take a photo of an ingredients list from the camera or the camera roll and scan the list for any dangerous chemicals. If any are found, the application would alert the user and explain what that chemical does and why it may be harmful, so that the user can make an informed purchase. The guide would link to multiple resources for the care and keeping of curly or wavy hair, keeping the most popular resources in one place.
How I built it
I built the app using a React template called pwa-starter, intended for Progressive Web App React applications.
Challenges I ran into
Most of the challenges I ran into were based around inexperience in React. Getting my head wrapped around React again after not using it for a few months was rough, but after getting used to it again I found some more problems. The imports I was trying to use for OCR and Camera usage each had various issues that I was unable to resolve - attempting to use multiple different OCRs and troubleshoot them all took up a lot of my time. I had to sort of “give up” at around 2am, since I have a flight Sunday morning that I need sleep for - and after 6 straight hours on the same issue I felt like I wasn’t making any more progress
Accomplishments that I am proud of
I am proud of getting as much done as I did all by myself, re-learning React and putting together the skeleton of a product I am really interested in.
What I learned
I learned a lot about domains, hosts, and the entire process of deploying a full website.
What's next for Curl Element
Next steps are definitely to get the original concept actually implemented, and past that I think I would like to add to the product in various ways, like allowing the user to import any allergies they may have to allow the app to also filter out those ingredients.
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