What lead to Más?
While brainstorming ideas for the project, we discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the issue of homelessness. Especially during winters, staying outdoors is simply not an option in many cold areas. Therefore, we thought of building a platform that gives those in need real time updates about available spaces in shelters nearby. In the same conversation, we also talked about how restaurants and diners generally produce more food than they can sell, resulting in a huge wastages of food. Unfortunately, restaurants cannot deliver surplus food directly to the those in need due to legal reasons. Therefore, we came up with the idea of establishing a 3-way connect between people in need, nearby shelters, and restaurants. Shelters could request food from restaurants and communicate food availability along with space availabilities.
What it does
Más attempts to tackle the issue of food wastage in restaurants and the issue of hunger/homelessness by creating a platform where restaurants are able to communicate information about surplus or leftover food with nearby shelters that have food shortages with the increase in inflow of people in need of food. Shelters then update their bed and food availabilities accordingly in order to keep homeless people informed about food and spaces. People in need of shelter or food can simply enter their zip code and obtain a list of nearby shelters that have spaces and food available.
How we built it
We built it using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the coding languages. We also live coded the website together using Repl.it, to collaborate on coding.
Challenges faced
The two main challenges we faced were
- Deciding on the features that we could include realistically given the deadline (in a way that allows scaling in the future)
- Deciding on the language/framework to use given that we had varying experience in web and mobile app development
What we learned
We learned how to build the front-end of an application from scratch using pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (without using any frameworks). We all came in with varying understanding of the languages and were able to learn more about the languages we were less experienced with.
What's next for Más
As of now, we have built a solid front-end to the application and the immediate task would be to link it to a database and develop the back end of the application. In terms of vision for the future, we can think of ways to connect Más to restaurant and shelter management systems so that the availability data is always up-to-date.
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