Food Pins

Home Page
Form that creates pins and locations where food is given out
Different pins on live updating map
When you click on a pin you are given addition info and directions to that pin

Inspiration

We were always taught growing up that food should never be wasted. I had also seen plenty of times news reports about how many companies were often throwing away perfectly good food because they did not know what to do with it at the end of the day. This led our group to be inspired to try and solve this issue and create an alternative way so companies don't have to waste their food.

What it does

Food Pins is a site where restaurants/households can give away food that they would have otherwise thrown out. The restaurant/person donating fills out a form with their location and details to create a pin in our real-time updating map. The homeless see a real-time updating map of locations where they can get food. This reduces food waste but more importantly, ensures that no one sleeps hungry.

How we built it

We utilized React.js for the front end, google maps API for the real-time updating map, firebase as the backend, and CSS to style everything.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges with rendering the map, creating a marker system, and implementing a backend. The map wouldn't render at times and the pins/markers would disappear. We optimized and rewrote some of our react code that was rendering the map and pins which solved all these issues. This was primarily a challenge because we were working with technologies that we had not used previously so by doing this, we were able to advance are skills a lot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the marker system that we created as it is highly accurate and can provide directions and the time it would take for an individual to get from their location to a donation pin. We are also proud of the way that we were able to integrate this map system with forms from users with a backend to manage everything.

What we learned

We learned how to tackle different challenges and overcome them. As cliche as it sounds we learned how to search up our issues and figure out ways to solve them through documentation and of course, stack overflow. I believe that this was a really important skill to learn and it will help us create better future projects.

What's next for Food Pins

We want to reduce the site's reliance on the internet(only 53% of the homeless have access to the internet) and create an app to increase accessibility. This includes abilities to print out the map and also more ways such as newspapers to connect us with homeless users.