What inspired us:
We wanted to solve a real world problem, and as university students we know what it's like to live on a tight budget. Food is becoming a luxury when it should be a right. Through the power of Community Supported Agriculture our app connects the right people to harness their true buying power by supporting local farmers directly.
What it does:
It compiles various food finding, budgeting, buying, and growing resources with a food bank map, growing list of budget recipes, a forum devoted to growing your own food, and a forum built to connect farmers directly to consumers with a pledge system to allow wholesale purchasing at individual prices.
How we built it:
Using the knowledge we have of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL we built a (mostly) functioning demo. The website is locally hosted using Apache through XAMPP, a new skill developed during this hackathon.
Challenges we ran into:
For my first time integrating PHP into HTML, front-end ran into issues with scope and targeting. As well, they spent plenty of time debugging JavaScript code. Our back-end developer faced plenty of challenges building our forum databases and mechanics from scratch. This led to many opportunities to find creative solutions to technical problems. Due to issues with older technology, one of our 2 laptops were unable to connect to the internet. This meant that our back-end was programming blind. He built pieces without being able to plug in and test, and required the front-end to break for testing, losing us some time in the process.
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
As his first time hosting a server, our back-end developer is proud
What we learned:
We learned how find a problem and create a solution under pressure. Back-end learned how to host a server locally, uploading images onto a server and integrating them with our database. Our front-end developer got to dip into PHP for the first time and peek behind the curtains of web-app development. Most importantly, we learned how to manage our workflow to deliver the right pieces at the right time.
What's next for FeedAFriend : Your Virtual Community Garden:
Expanding the food bank map to include more Nova Scotian food banks and eventually upgrading to a system where points don't have to be added manually with coordinates. As well, including community gardens and free meal programs to the map is a goal.
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