HungryValley

So Happy Valley will never be a Hungry Valley

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Inspiration

As students struggling with food insecurity, we understand the privilege of accessible and low-cost food, such as food from food pantries. However, awareness of these community-based food pantries are limited, as there is little to no resources to find these mini pantries.

What it does

We developed a website that locates and navigates its users to little free pantries around the area. Our idea is inspired by the Little Free Library app, where members of the community can buy ready-made shelves and unique IDs from the company and put in books that they want to donate to their community. Users of the app can navigate these shelves through the app and take the books that they are interested in. We've decided to put our on twist on this idea, where the shelves house non-perishable foods instead. These little free pantries are already available in our community, but community awareness is limited because of sparce resources. Our idea is to provide weather-proof ready-made shelves and unique IDs for purchase. 'Vendors' who purchase these shelves can manage their own little free pantry that will be listed and promoted to our users using the website.

How we built it

We sketched out our ideas on paper, before developing wireframes on Figma (as provided in the Image Gallery). We developed the front-end using CSS and React on VS Code, and we used Node.js, Mongoose, and MongoDB to create the database for users (Fetch and Express was used in the building the code for the database as well). Furthermore, we incorporated an Open Source Java Library, Leaflet.js, as an interactive map embedded on our website. We also used Auth0 to authenticate and authorize users. We also made use of GitHub Copilot to streamline our work processes.

Challenges we ran into

We have problems with deploying the website on Vercel. We also struggled with understanding the dependencies pf the tools needed for our project. As we are all relatively new to these technologies, we had a hard time with comprehending the features of each technology.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is most of our team's first hackathon, and we learned all the technologies we implemented into our website React, MongoDB, and Auth0 over the weekend.

What we learned

We grew comfortable using VS Code for development and the innerworkings of a website (database servers, security, language compatibility), despite the short time period. It introduced us to many features and dependencies that we have never been exposed to before.

What's next for HungryValley

More functionality for the website and a functional search bar. We are also looking to see if there are any projects with similar goals for the future.

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