Inspiration
During the pandemic, the homeless and low-income groups have been impacted greatly. Many of the shelters were not able to house the homeless population leaving many of them without support. give changes that.
What it does
give. is a platform for restaurants to advertise the foods they have leftover and the amount of food they have leftover. This will allow people in need to see the closest spot to them with food and be able to have access to a food supply.
How we built it
give. is built using reactJS on the frontend and firebase for the backend.
Challenges we ran into
One of the challenges I ran into was that I was unable to read data from my database without being authenticated. My quick fix for that was to use a JSON file that would store some information about the various restaurants donating food.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm very proud about how the home, signin, and signup page turned out to look. I have always wanted my projects to look more professional and I think I achieved that with those pages.
What we learned
I learned that databases are super powerful and have security rules in place that are there to protect your data. However, I was still very tempted to bypass the rules to get a feature I wanted to add to work properly. I decided against it because it is more important to keep the data secure.
What's next for give.
One of the biggest hurdles for give. is its lack of accessibility. The app is centered around the low-income community who might not have access to the internet. My next goal would be to figure out a way where I could get the nearest locations with restaurants that are donating food into an MTA subway Kiosk. This way this information is widely available to everyone who needs it. In addition, this idea can be implemented into bus stops with digital screens.
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