Meals That Care

Inspiration

New Year resolutions involve taking care of oneself but never taking care of others. The way to a person's heart is through their stomach and those who need food don't get it enough. This became the basis of our inspiration and from there we noticed that many people would either throw unused food out or let it expire because they have no use for it; this cumulated to the birth of Meals That Care.

What it does

Meals That Care is a web application that will match the user with the closest food bank in their area that accepts a certain donation. This donation can be a food item or toiletries and the user will be matched with whatever food banks accept the item.

How we built it

Meals That Care had the frontend built with CSS and HTML while the backend was built with JavaScript in the Node.js runtime environment and CockroachDB. There were several APIs used with the most notable being Chrome's Maps JavaScript API.

Challenges we ran into

The major hurdles we faced were the implementation of the frontend to communicate with JavaScript and our database. Alongside this, using the Google Map API became a challenge for proper implementation due to it needing coordinates that were not fully accurate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting our feet wet with Databases, Chrome APIs, and making Node.js work with CSS and HTML.

What we learned

We developed a stronger understanding of frontend and backend communication through the need of making our webpage display unique information based on what is searched. We also began our journey of learning Databases and exploring the extensive Chrome API library.

What's next for Meals That Care

Making it more robust and wide-scale which can be done by letting users add their own Food Banks into the database and updating Food Bank data as well.