menu-alerts

email
editing users and preferances

Inspiration

Independent students only get two free swipes into the dining hall every week. They need a way to optimize it.

What it does

It sends emails to users who specify their favorite foods when and where they are being served in the upcoming week!

How we built it

We obtained menu data from the menu api. We used the emails library for sending emails, Flask-Admin for editing the MongoDB database of users, Heroku for hosting.

Challenges we ran into

Heroku had some issues logging into the tigermenu@gmail.com address. We had to disable a bunch of security features of Gmail to let it log in.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Many COS 333 semester-long projects in the past involve food alerts. But we built ours in one hackathon!

What we learned

That some libraries are way overpowered. Especially Flask-Admin for making editing the database easy and emails for making emails painless.

What's next for menu-alerts

Instead of daily emails, let users specify how often. Add lunch alerts. Make it look nicer. Don't let everyone be able to edit anything on the sites with full admin rights. Use a better matching algorithm for user preferences matching beyond string equality.