Inspiration
As a student living on campus at UCSC, I know how difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming it can be to get groceries. UCSC is quite removed from the main city, which makes for gorgeous views, but a quick trip to the grocery store could end up being hours when you rely on the bus system to get you around. Sometimes the bus doesn't come at its scheduled time or you finish your shopping trip within 10 minutes, but the bus doesn't come for another 30 minutes to an hour. I wanted to find a way that students could help each other get their groceries and also reduce average delivery costs to campus, so I came up with the idea of an app called Grocery Pal (UCSC).
What it does
Students who are going to the grocery store (Trader Joe's, Safeway, Whole Foods, etc.) can post which store they are going to, how long they're going to be there, and how many items they can pick up for someone on campus. A student on campus can select a posting and message the person picking up the items their grocery list. This post will then disappear and those two people will coordinate their pick up. The person going to the store can set their price for picking up the items (ex: $5 for the trip). Because many students use public transport, hopefully, this app will result in lower delivery costs for students (i.e. not paying for gas). It would also definitely kill two birds with one stone by having one student get groceries for two (while also getting paid to do it!)
How I built it
Since I don't know how to fluently program in languages for mobile and web applications, I couldn't design a whole app this time around, so I decided that I would learn how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as React and Twilio libraries, to create a basic demo of what I would want the app to look like as a web application. I started off by programming the ability to send SMS messages from React with Twilio (https://www.twilio.com/blog/send-an-sms-react-twilio). I then played around with the HTML and CSS to design the page (i.e. embedding links, inserting pictures, adding text, etc.).
Challenges I ran into
I had some trouble with formatting so I had to work around some design decisions. Also, as of right now, the SMS ability that I have on the website only sends messages to my phone. This can definitely be changed with some tweaking in the code.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that I essentially started creating my idea for my app. Although it's just a basic example of the layout, I think it's a solid start for an actual app that I would like to deploy on my campus.
What I learned
I learned so much about browsers and languages designed for application building. I picked up on many programming nuances that I didn't understand before like what a browser compiler can and cannot understand and WHY (i.e. the browser can't understand python because of its limited compiler capabilities. The main use of a browser is to gather, display, and send information, especially sending information to servers and more complicated programs).
What's next for Grocery Pal (UCSC)
What's next for Grocery pal (UCSC) is to create the actual app! I now have a better idea of how I would want to design it and I actually have some solid code to build off of.
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