Do They Have It

Inspiration

Living in the Los Angeles Area, trying to find groceries has become difficult. People persist in panic-buying and hoarding. In order to find food, we end up having to visit three or more stores, with each store having only some items in stock.

What it does

It provides a platform for people to see which stores have which items currently in stock. It is crowd-sourced, with the site's users updating the status of the items as they are actively shopping in stores. The idea behind the site is to limit contact, so instead of having to visit multiple stores, users can hopefully limit the number of stores necessary to visit to obtain groceries to a minimum.

How I built it

I built the site on Django. It is made up of a core app, an app for stores, and will contain an app for items as well.

Challenges I ran into

One of the challenges I ran into was the front end design. I was originally planning on making it a Single Page App, but due to time constraints, built it as a traditional multi-page site instead.

Another challenge was how to be able to find stores within a radius for the user. I tried using the location services built into most browsers, but after running into issues getting the location, (which I believe have to do with the fact that development server is running http, while the location services require https), I opted to focus on the user entering their zipcode, looking up the coordinates for that zipcode, then using those coordinates to search for all stores in a radius.

What I learned

I learned quite a bit about GIS, and specifically using GIS data with Django and Postgresql.

What's next for Do They Have It

Additional features needed before launch are the ability for users to suggest/add stores, categories and items, and allowing a user to search by items for the nearest store with those in stock.

Built With

• locationiq
• python-django