FoodHax

Home Page: the blue icon represents current location, the rest are local food banks
When you click on a point, a pop up will show with the address and google street view.
When you click out of the homepage, you will go to another site that has information on directions and hours of the food bank.

Inspiration

Prior to SteelHacks, we all sat down to discuss pressing issues in our community. One team member shared their personal experiences with food insecurity in their family and the rest of our team decided to create a website designed to find food banks and local pantries in the Pittsburgh area.

What it does

FoodHax organizes information about food pantries including where they are located and driving/walking directions to them along with information on what food/other items the pantry has and what their hours are.

How we built it

To create our website, we had two people working on the frontend and two people on the backend at the same time to maximize efficiency. For the frontend, HTML, CSS, and embedded JS were used for our design. Figma was used to design the layout of our pages. The logo was created in procreate. On the backend, Python's Django framework was used to link our files together.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge for our beginner team was learning how to use and incorporate Google API, as none of us had had experience with API keys before. As such, it was a struggle to incorporate its various features and troubleshoot various issues that initially popped up such as the map struggling to load or getting the directions to work properly. However, through perseverance, team work and talking to others with experience, we were able to compile everything correctly for success.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

Being a beginner team, we learned how to collaborate together using VS Code and GitHub Desktop. Additionally, we taught ourselves how to use the GoogleAPI and HTML/CSS. We also learned how to use Django for our backend.

What's next for FoodHax

For better scalability, we would incorporate a side for the food pantries to update their stock, essentially creating a continuously updating database that users can then check to view what is available at local food banks. Additionally, we could add a comments and review section for logged in users to give reviews on their experiences at the food banks.