Runk Runners

Inspiration

As college students at UVA, we work late at night - either doing homework, studying, or simply procrastinating. Often, we find ourselves snacking throughout the night. It occurred to me one night that I was incredibly limited in my food selection. In fact, the other day, I had the stellar choice between ramen, three-week-old pizza that I forgot to throw out, or walking several miles in the blistering cold to go to Sheetz and pick up the most unhealthy food imaginable (No disrespect to Sheetz - I love it dearly). Seeing as though we wanted late-night food, we assumed other college students would also buy into the idea of late-night snack delivery. That said, we wanted snacks that wouldn't make me feel sick in the morning. We wanted to promote healthy eating in the time/location where eating unhealthy foods is commonplace. By creating a system where people have easy and, importantly, affordable access to healthy snack options was paramount to supporting and creating a community where healthy diets are attainable. These ideals combined with a hungry code junky, Runk Runners was born.

What it does

Runk Runners is a late-night delivery service that provides healthy snacks to hungry college students. Imagine UberEats but specialized in healthy food and doesn't include the ridiculous price gauging aspect. At the moment, Runk Runners is in its infancy. Functionally, you can fill out a Google Form (I wish I had the know-how to make a mobile app - but that's for the future of Runk Runners) and your response is uploaded to a Google Sheet. Along with all the order requests, that Google Sheet has snack/product information and the active deliverers (runners, if you'd like) for operational hours. A script is run locally and constantly pulls information from the spreadsheet. As a function of the orders and products, delivery people are assigned orders to deliver and the spreadsheet automatically updates given the orders. Additionally, for new orders, the program sends a text message via Twilio to indicate who is delivering your order, an approximation of delivery time (which used Google Cloud's Geo-Coding API), and their total cost of the order.

How we built it

We built Runk Runners completely in PyCharm, developed in python. We started by creating basic classes, integrating the spreadsheet, linking it to the sheet, and pooling information from all three sources. By using basic frameworks, we designed the system to be very scalable with minimal additional refactoring - which I'm very excited about for future development. We used a multitude of features from Google Cloud. Specifically, we used the geocoding API to develop an estimation algorithm for the delivery time of any one particular order based on their address. We used the routing API to build an optimized delivery route for the runners and their orders.

Challenges we ran into

At one point, we were completely lost and confused as to what we were doing (partially because of a lack of sleep but partially because my code was very disorganized). I started getting really ambitious about newfound functionalities and slightly lost track of the main purpose of the program. Also, truth be told, this is not the most efficient program. Runtimes will definitely be an issue and will need to be refactored later!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very happy to have developed a functional and scalable database/delivery system. When we started, we were a bit overwhelmed but - piece by piece - the project started coming together and the system was nicely integrated. I've had this idea for a while and to actually start building the project is wonderful. We're incredibly happy with all the functionality that was able to be built in the time we were allotted.

What we learned

Through HooHacks, we've learned a lot. As more of a back-end developer, we now understand the importance of having front-end skills in order to properly demonstrate the system as best as possible. We would like to learn more about web development as well as how to build a mobile application. We also learned how useful Google Cloud is; there are so many utilities to explore and utilize for various projects in the future.

What's next for Runk Runners

We think there's a lot of potential for Runk Runners. We'd like to continue development - now focusing on the mobile application side. The appeal of UberEats and other such services is the ease of use: click several buttons and there's a hamburger on its way. We'd like a similar implementation to be done with Runk Runners - you're only a few taps away from cheap, healthy snacks delivered straight to you. First, we'd like to host a web server on Google Cloud and run the script on the Cloud rather than locally; then, we'd like to develop a mobile application and refactor the system to integrate well with the new mobile application. Finally, we'd like to extend the business model to other foods (not necessarily restaurant level) but other snacks that might garner a larger audience.

Built With

• google-cloud
• google-directions
• google-form
• google-routes
• google-spreadsheets
• pycharm
• python
• twilio