Inspiration
Food insecurity is something we observe everyday, even as a college student here at UVA. We were inspired by the amount of waste we see daily, and by the need to bridge the gap between food resources and getting it to communities that need it.
What it does
InKind is a web application that allows users to sign up for an account and connects them with local food banks based on their location.
How we built it
We used a combination of react for the front end development, Node.js for the backend and google maps API for location matching. We used firebase for data, chakra for UI, and vite.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge we ran into was implementing the google maps API: it was a struggle to figure out how to accurately do location based tracking. When the google maps API was called too many times it made the website slow. Another challenge we ran into was getting the firebase to work properly, and the formatting of the data. It took us a while to figure out how to store and manage all the data of everyone that used the program.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of getting the firebase to work properly, and having a strong and reliable program to store the data and information of all our users in. Another accomplishment that we're proud of is getting the google maps API location matching to work: that was one of the more difficult aspects of this project and integrating the location based feature into it. We're proud of being able to make the web app also look. very visually appealing.
What we learned
For the majority of us (all but one) it was our first time using react, so that was a new skill for a lot of us to figure out how to use react for a variety of different functions (about page, shelter sign up, sign up, and log in). Learning firebase and how to properly store the data and format it was a huge learning curve as well.
What's next for InKind: Connecting Communities
The scope we brought into this hackathon was a US-based system, but potentially this idea could be expanded into a global scale where sub sections of InKind could exist and apply to different countries with different kind of food banks and food resource allocation systems. We could also integrate more features into the website like a "feature" volunteer page where people can actually see the impact that InKind has.
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