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Inspiration: The high obesity rates in America, the lack of healthy diets, and people who live in poverty not being able to maintain a healthy lifestyle and eat healthy food.
What it does: Our application allows users to input their budget which then returns 5 healthy and delicious recipes that can be prepared at home within a short period of time and fit the range of their inputted budget.
How I built it: We implemented a lot of web scraping and graphics to return 5 random links from our popularly used website which fit the budget range which the user inputs in the beginning. To go into depth the video explains it and how we used array lists and for loops to set button commands and creating classes that utilize HTML to return data from our chosen recipe website.
Challenges I ran into: Almost every possible challenge you could think of for this project: we ran into. It was either the web scraping that didn't return the results we wanted, the graphics not displaying what we wanted, the buttons not working, even turning the project into an executable jar file. We literally had a problem with everything but we fought through it and solved each and every problem until the application worked as we wanted it to.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of: We all learned a lot whether it was some web scraping for some or a lot of it for others(Roee) or using swing to create complicated graphics. Genuinely we learned everything and developed the whole application with barely any knowledge about coding but instead, we constantly used google and the java API to research methods and other code. We felt great at the end of the hackathon and knew that the hard work paid off because we finished with an application we loved and watched be built from scratch to only appreciate it later.
What I learned: I learned that hackathons are about creating an idea revolving a theme and quickly developing it leading to my belief that coding projects is the best way to learn coding, especially with a team or friends. Also, my team and I learned that helping solve problems for society feels good when you create a program for it and it works.
What's next for HealthAlt: Next we would like to change the graphics and make the application look nicer while also updating the web scraping and making it work better and even moving the whole application to a website of our own. The possibilities are endless.
