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Jamal, our favorite dog.
Inspiration
Every year, 7.6 million animals enter shelters, and approximately 2.7 million animals are euthanized. In addition, a large barrier to pet adoptions is the set of hidden fees and costs that are required to properly adopt (e.g. splaying and neutering, veterinary visits, microchipping, etc). We wanted to increase adoption rates by minimizing the barriers to entry to doing so.
What it does
Welcome to PawBank, where generous individuals can contribute small amounts of money to help build credit for pets.
How I built it
We built an iOS app in Swift that provided the donation front-end and connected it to a Flask backend with an SQL Alchemy database. Information was transitioned between Swift and Flask using JSON. Overall, the process allows for information transfer between the front + backend while maintaining transferability to other platforms should the need arise.
Challenges I ran into
This was my first time working with substantial Python, as well as any backend, networking, and JSON. It was my partner’s first time working with Swift. We spent the weekend running into quite a few knowledge-related questions that slowed us down, but overall we were able to push through these roadblocks to create a functional application!
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We managed to build a functioning app with an SQL database serving our application. We were able to digest and comprehend new concepts, as well as turn those ideas into tangible code over the course of a weekend. The feeling I got when my database first got hit for information retrieval was awesome!
What I learned
I learned that oftentimes the bottleneck in our project was general comprehension of industry applications of code. I didn’t really think about how much was out there until I started reading into all the different database formats, backend options, and code interactions.
What's next for PawBank
The next steps are to take our prototype and turn it into a full-fledged app capable of accepting payments. Additionally, I want to move the server side onto a provider like AWS or GCP so that we can have consistent uptime. Finally, I’d love to pursue this further by looking into the Los Angeles pet adoption market and exploring potential opportunities to bring this kind of product to the forefront of the pet adoption landscape.
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