Foodstall

Inspiration

Food is an essential part of human existence. I mean the intro line wasn't supposed to be so serious. Well, lemme try to explain why we made Foodstall through a case study based upon myself. So, I used to have this amazing place at my neighborhood that used to sell momo and rolls. But suddenly the shop disappeared one day. The shop was like a stall, not properly setup, so there was no exact address, and I didn't have the contact number of the person either. That is something that Foodstall could've solved. Foodstall focuses on bringing spotlight to these small food restaurants, that lack address and a proper identity. It also simplifies the process of listing your food-place on an online platform. That was our inspiration to build this project.

What it does

Foodstall is an application that is built on top of many technologies to solve the very existing problem of food stalls. We want people to be able to find, rate, review and enjoy the local food stalls around them. The app is a positive change for both business doers and consumers since it gives the stalls identity which increase the popularity of stalls and helps the customers to find them easily. In the MVP (minimum viable product), we've used a small dummy dataset that we created ourselves. The users would be able to view stalls around them, apply many kinds of filters, see specific details such as exact map location, menu, showstopper products and be able to call or text the owner directly. The app has a simple but elegant UI which is easy on eyes and it easy to use as well.

How we built it

Building Foodstall was a step by step process. It involved:-

Market research to find out the problem and its impact.
Making an API that can cater our needs:-
We used stepzen to make our GraphQL API.
We connected the API through the dataset that was hosted on MongoDB, which was created by ourselves.
We deployed the API through stepzen as well.
Used Figma and Canva to make the app design.
We made the app in flutter which serves to the user end.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into couple of challenges while making the project. They include:-

Problems with finding data API methods on Mongo.
Calling GraphQL queries from flutter.
Deciding and creating fields in our data.
Working with different datatypes in GraphQL queries.

But, we're very happy that we were able to overcome them all.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud that we were able to pull this project and complete it in the way we wanted to. The functionalities of stepzen made the process of creating an API a piece of cake, and we're happy that we used it. We are happy that we utilised the resources hopefully in the right way and put them all together to make foodstall. Also, the API is very much reusable and can be integrated with more frontend frameworks, which makes it even more amazing.

What we learned

We learnt almost everything about stepzen, since it was our first time using it in any project. We also learnt more about GraphQL in general and its advantages.

What's next for Foodstall

We have so many things planned up. We can make multiple endpoints of data and then make the app do many more things such as showing recommendations, sorting with properties, adding owner's side and more.