Gist

A simple way to plan ahead for all your grocery-shopping needs.

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Inspiration

For many, the start of a new quarter means learning how to live with new roommates. As we ourselves adjusted to living with each other, we wanted to work on a project that would improve the quality-of-life for all of us.

What it does

Gist is a handy app that goes beyond your average grocery list. When you add an item to your list, you can select specific stores near the UW campus and cross-check their prices/availability. Lists can be saved, sparing you the hassle of making new grocery lists every time, and making it easier for you to budget your spending. Lists are shareable with roommates, family members, or friends, so everyone can add what they need and you can avoid making multiple trips to the stores throughout the week.

How we built it

We started with Figma prototyping for the basic UI and functionality. From there we divvied up the back-end (web-scraping of online store websites using python) and front-end (React native app). At the end we put together what we had.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest problem was starting. We had never done a hackathon before and none of us were familiar with React Native so we spent a lot of time figuring everything out the first time. Once we got setup, it was just a matter of finishing things part by part.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even though there wasn't much tangible progress until very late into the night, we were able to teach ourselves a lot about React Native, Python web-scraping, and app ideation. Overall, we would consider this hackathon success because we learned more about different programming languages, made good progress into our app, and developed a passion for doing projects.

What we learned

We learned more about the different parts that go into making an app. On a technical level, we are more familiar with react, selenium, and networking requests. On a process side, we learned a lot about planning and organization for product creation.

What's next for Gist

This is a product that we would genuinely benefit from, so we aim to make it work and use it for our own grocery shopping needs. We need to finish the UI and publish the webserver. Next, we hope to automatically pull and compare different stores and build carts. With time, hopefully this is something we can share with other students as well.

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