Gifty

Welcome to the gifty home page!

Inspiration

All of our team members agreed that while we love giving gifts to our friends and family, finding the perfect present for someone could be incredibly difficult. It's hard to know where to start, and stores like Amazon can be overwhelming with the number of options.

What it does

Our solution to this problem was Gifty. You enter some parameters about the person you're shopping for, some keywords to describe the type of present you think they'd enjoy, and the budget you're working with. Then, Gifty suggests several fun ideas that we believe the your friends will adore.

How we built it

After coming up with the initial idea around Gifty, we prototyped our project with Figma to make sure the UI looked just right. We then built out our UI using React in Javascript and Material UI components, and created an API using Ruby on Rails. We also populated a database filled with gift ideas, with each gift associated with various keywords. When a user fills out a form describing a friend, a list of keywords is sent to the backend. The top 6 gifts that match those keywords is returned and displayed to the user.

Challenges we ran into

Although some members of the team were comfortable building the backend, and others were comfortable building the frontend, no one on the team had much experience connecting the two which led to some major roadblocks. This was also the first hackathon for all of our team members, so it was difficult to accurately judge what we would be able to accomplish during the course of the weekend.