Leftover Love

Filling Plates and Fulfilling hearts. That's the mission of Leftover Love, we offer a bridge between those who want to give back and those in need.

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Inspiration

According to a 2017 research paper, titled "No Digital Divide? Technology Use among Homeless Adults", a vast majority of (upto 94%) homeless adults own a cellphone (and 86% of those used Android operating systems). Out of those, about (85%) used a cell phone daily, 76% used text messaging, and 51% accessed the Internet on their cell phone. These statistics inspired us to use technology to connect those in need of food/supplies with those in surplus (waste) and develop a mobile app called Leftover Love - "Filling Plates, Fulfilling Hearts".

What it does

Leftover Love connects the leftover and otherwise wasted food from restaurants to those who need it most. Upon entering the app, users can view the local restaurants in their area who have listed leftovers for pickup. The user then goes to these restaurants and selects which item(s) they want, scanning a QR code and receiving their delicious food as long as they do not go over the daily limit of course.

How we built it

Fontend: Solidjs, Capacitor, Auth0 The fontend is a single page application built with solidjs framework. It can run both in browser and natively on android user Capacitor as the container. Auth0 is used to verify users phone numbers on log in. backend: was developed using Flask and Mongodb hosted on an AWS EC2 instance. Flask [flask_restful] was used to develop a RESTful API to handle request from the mobile app and interact with the database. We chose MongoDB [pymongo] for storing user data for horizontal scalability, and the ability to handle a large influx of requests efficiently.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges thorough this project. It was our first time using a big portion of our stack. The first issue we ran into was setting up our dev environment for both web dev and android development. It was our firs time that our team was using Capacitor Ionic so it took us sometime. Secondly configuring Auth0 authentication for a process that runs both as a single page application and a native mobile app was confusing to say the least. Further more we ran into issues developing the backend - MongoDB unfortunately did not have a free tier version compatible with Google Cloud, forcing us to switch to AWS and then ultimately converting one of our personal laptops to a temporary server over a private network (mobile hotspot).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We were proud of our Auth0 integration and used it to redirect users around our app and verify phone numbers.
  • Although it was redundant we deployed an app on both AWS and GCP for the first time.
  • One of our members used SolidJS for the first time. ## What we learned We learned a lot of new technologies throughout the project. We learned how to use Auth0, Capacitor, MongoDB and Flask. We also learn that the scope of our project made was to large for the allotted time frame. We plan to approach our next Hackathon with a more focused solution.

What's next for Leftover Love

Once Leftover Love is completely polished, the next steps are as follows:

  • Secure Funding
  • Connect with Restaurant chains to discuss interests and spread awareness
  • Add Compatibility with IOS devices
  • and much more!

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