Inspiration
After waiting 15 minutes for a boba or 25 minutes for a grilled cheese sandwich, our team realized a problem. With lines held up at the cashier, so many restaurants were losing customers wanting a quicker experience for taking out food. Having encountered this problem first-hand, our team decided to build a mobile platform that streamlines the takeout experience – a web application where customers can order their favorite meal and simply pick it up at the restaurant.
What it does
Pick Me Up is a web application that allows restaurants to onboard and accept take out orders from their customers. This way, restaurants can increase their mobile presence and customers can more quickly and efficiently get their favorite meal to-go! We also hope to increase customer engagement through a loyalty program.
How we built it
Our app is being built on the Ruby on Rails framework. On the frontend we are using the ReactJS library with HTML and Bootstrap-sass. We are also trying out the Slim templating language and SplashJS for visual rendition.
Database management is done via Postgres, and we have no final decisions on deployment, but we are currently looking into Amazon Web Services.
Challenges we ran into
We first ran into a challenge of acquiring restaurants that would want to be on our platform, given that we did not have a fully working prototype yet. Trying to understand the full framework of Ruby on Rails wasn’t an overnight task. It took quite a bit of time, and that ate quite a lot of time from us. We ended up rewriting code from scratch more than a few times.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
CalHacks 4.0 was our first hackathon, and our first attempt at creating a functional web app. While we weren't able to finish the prototype, we learned so much through the experience. Development started to take off only after we reached a certain level of understanding, and we're proud to have reached that level - we are confident that we'll have a working app in the very near future!
While hard to convince restaurants without a fully working prototype, we were able to share our vision with more than 5 restaurants in Berkeley, who were willing to put their restaurant onto our application once we were running!
What we learned
Our first web app, Pick Me Up taught us everything from using the Ruby on Rails framework itself to frontend development through HTML and ReactJS... the hard way. It was a first for all of us and while we did manage to gain a good understanding of the technology we learned this weekend, it was quite a struggle. We hope to pick up speed now that we've made it through!
What's next for Pick Me Up
What's next for Pick Me Up We hope to introduce our prototype to further restaurants, and more importantly, the student population! We'd love to see busy students actively use the app to shave time and have better engagement with restaurants through the loyalty feature! Stay tuned!
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