Inspiration
With rising delivery rates on the ever increasingly ubiquitous food delivery platforms we thought it would be better if we took the power away from the corporations and gave back to the people (where it belongs). By allowing smaller delivery rates across the board and giving the delivery driver a bonus, we create a system of people helping people, with out needing "free labor".
What it does
The website allows you two options, "Join a pool" or "Start a pool". A pool is a group of people all agreeing to get meals from a restaurant at the same time, with one person picking it up. By clicking on "Join a pool", you are given the option to be a part of a group of people ordering from a specific, predetermined restaurant, and you pledge not only to pay for the meal, but to pay a small delivery charge for the driver. By clicking on "Start a pool", you enter some information into the website such as which restaurant you plan on going to and how long until you head out, and the website automatically turns that into a post in the "Join a pool" section, where it is shown to people in a predetermined radius away from you. To give some security to the program, the rating system (both for buyers and delivery people) allows people to limit the amount of people that can see the post and act on it.
How we built it
Starting off with a python + Django combo, we were able to get the front and the back end created in tandem. Html5 was a must, as this is a website, and to make it look non-generic we used the CSS frame work bootstrap to give it a little personal touch. We were a team of four, and we each split into sections, and worked on our personal strengths. Towards the last remaining hours, we came back together to link it all up.
Challenges we ran in to
Time was a huge constraint this time. Our team of four has been to hackathons together before, with almost all of them being 36 hour hackathons, we weren't completely ready for the time constraints Grizzhacks' 24 hour limit gave us. Toward the end we got pretty much all of the features we wanted, but it was a pretty big challenge. However, the biggest challenge we faced is when we found out all the work our front-end guys were doing in Vue and Vuetify couldn't be used and had to be scrapped. That was a huge blow for the team and took hours to get over. After moving on, we strived to be better and tried our best to make a app with what we could use.
Accomplishments we are proud of
I touched on the issue a little bit in the challenge section, but when we found out that the front end guys work that they had been doing, with making the structure and design for the website with Vue and Vuetify had to be completely scrapped for our back end being able to connect, the morale hit was huge. It was late at night (or early in the morning depending on how you look at it), and nobody had slept yet. With half of our teams work being scrapped, the teams morale was at a all time low. But we overcame that challenge as the night went on, as we realized we had to get over it because things like that happen. Our whole team came together and made the app in record time, better than we think it would have turned out before. That was probably our greatest accomplishment of the night, turning a bad situation into something we could do.
What we learned
We learned some valuable life lessons in the process of making the app, the biggest of which being the lesson we learned after we found out half of our teams work became somewhat pointless. We learned that setbacks like this happen, and we need to get over it and overcome the challenge, because experiences like that only make the team come closer together and work harder that anyone thought they could.
Whats next for food pool
Some polishing of the website in terms of both design and functionality is definitely in order. We are firm believers that it is almost impossible to make something truly perfect, so out revisions would reflect that. Some possible future collaborations could be with restaurants, offering a discount if you had a pool, or having "official" drivers, to increase trust in the brand.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.