Find and Fetch

Find and Fetch is a website and Twilio service that helps pair pets from non-profit shelters with loving homes.

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Inspiration

Being our first Hackathon, we wanted to build a project that could solve a social issue that we are all passionate about. We wanted this to be a project for social good and really wanted this as an opportunity to use our passion for technology to contribute to our society. Being pet owners, we are all too conscious of the problem of pet abandonment. Roughly 6.5 million pets enter shelters every year in America but only 3.2 million are taken home. A huge reason for this is because there’s not a reliable way for people to find the perfect pet for themselves.

What It Does/ Accomplishments

Find and Fetch is a website that helps loving people find and fetch lovely pets. We ask people a series of questions to narrow down on their search and provide them with all the matches based on their preferences through our slick front end interface that we designed using Figma and implemented with HTML, CSS, and Flask. In our backend, we used Beautiful Soup to search the internet for potential fits and Python to tie everything together. We smartly filter based on the preferences that the user gives us, so each match is a perfect fit. If they can’t find the perfect friend, we have a service via Twilio that allows the user to input their phone number, and our algorithm will check everyday if there is any new match available and send you information via sms on them once we find it. With Find and Fetch, pets up for adoption will not go unnoticed anymore. Together we can take the first step towards ensuring that each and every pet has a warm and loving home to return to!

How We Built Our Project

We want to show our progress throughout this hackathon. For the first couple hours we worked on the backend to get Twilo working and the functionality to search the web for pets up for adoption in non-profit shelters. Next we created a simple frontend design as a proof of concept and to double check if our backend was working correctly. Finally, we did a more detailed design in figma and implemented it using Flask, HTML, and CSS.

Challenges

Since we started by building the front end and background separately, we run into a bit of issue trying to connect the front and back end together. Translating Figma into actual websites also turned out more challenging and time consuming than expected.

What We Learned

We learned how to worked well as a team and how to split up tasks evenly. We also learned how to use figma and twilio, as well as reading API documents. The project also gave us a great opportunity to practice using github and version control. More importantly, we learned how to use full stack to build a website.

What's Next

For next steps, we want to include more local non-profit pet shelters. We also want to include other animals such as cats, rabbits, and (most importantly) snakes that are also looking for a new home but might not be as popular here in the U.S. We can also adjust the front end a bit more and add new features using twilio like requesting a different pet or modifying requirements using text rather than having to go through the interface.

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