Pantry Patrol

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  Simple Dashboard

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  Email example

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  User management

Inspiration

Before the hackathon started, we really struggled to decide on a specific project. With so many ideas and technologies, we just weren't sure what to develop.

However, we were able to talk to an individual representing Davis Community Meals & Housing (DCMH) and inquire about their initial application ideas. From there, we ideated, discussing potential new features and ultimately, we decided on our project: Pantry Patrol.

What it does

Pantry Patrol is an inventory management application designed specifically for DCMH's specifications. They wanted an application that facilitated inventory management to assist with managing donations that came in. Additionally, they wanted a user interface that allowed individuals to understand what products they had on their "wish list" and the number of such products, such that potential donors don't "over-donate" on certain products.

Pantry Patrol handles all of this and MORE. For example, one of the priorities of DCMH was being reachable to donors and incentivizing donations. To account for this, we added an email blast feature that emails individuals subscribed to the organization's mailing list, such that they would periodically receive assistance emails when products are low in stock. This way, donors are hopefully more inclined to donate to the organization as they are being reached out to directly.

How we built it

We deployed a NextJS application, written in Typescript and styled using Tailwind, DaisyUI, ShadCN, and Aceternity. We strove to have a beautiful, yet intuitive UI for the members at DCMH to manage inventory easily using a visually appealing application.

To handle authentication, we utilized PropelAuth. Initially, we were super skeptical of the service because, at past hackathons, we used solutions like Auth0. However, as our team read PropelAuth's documentation, we realized that PropelAuth was intuitive and a strong provider of authentication services, despite being so new to us. We employed PropelAuth to create admin roles, and quickly set up authenticated routes, and admin-based actions and pages; this efficiency came largely due to using PropelAuth's services.

Finally, to store data (inventory data), we created a cluster on MongoDB Atlas and easily handled CRUD operations to this cloud database using the Prisma ORM and, occasionally, MongoDB Compass.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we had trouble envisioning what we wanted the application to look like. With so many public UI libraries and CSS frameworks, we realized we could take millions of directions to design and style our application. Ultimately, we chose to blend various components from different libraries. However, this would lead to some issues in styling across different devices.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're truly proud to have created a solution for DCMH; it's an organization whose message and ideals we truly stand behind, and to create an application that we believe could help them means a lot to us. Prior to the hackathon, we directly spoke to representatives of DCMH as to how we could implement our application to cater to their specific use case; thus, many of the completed features, including "real-time inventory updates", were taken directly from feedback by DCMH. We wanted to design a fully-fledged application FOR the organization; we're happy to have accomplished that at HackDavis.

What we learned

We learned that sometimes, AI doesn't fit in an application. One of our group members spent hours trying to figure out how to train and integrate an LLM-based chatbot into our application. After spending these hours, however, we realized that the chatbot truly just didn't align with the direction and purpose of the application. As with many applications, an inventory management application doesn't need AI, and simply forcing it into the applications doesn't make the application better. We realized that our "integration" of a chatbot didn't make sense with what DCMH wanted, so we geared our efforts away from AI.

What's next for Pantry Patrol

We'd like to communicate with DCMH to see how plausible our application is in their efforts.

Built With

• aceternity
• bun
• daisyui
• mongodb
• next.js
• prisma
• propelauth
• resend
• shadcn
• tailwind
• typescript