Share a Meal

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project comes from Humans of New York. The Humans of New York page pairs up individuals (usually homeless people) with families during the holidays. We decided to implement this at a higher, more extensive level with our website which allows hosts to sign up to take on "wanderers" during the holiday season.

It’s important to connect our community and to build a support system for each and every person in need. One meal can make a huge difference in someone’s life.

What it does

Our website allows hosts to sign up to host another individual for a meal during the holiday season. They fill out a form in which they indicate characteristics of themselves and their home environment including things such as age, gender, and whether they have a family etc. All personal contact information is not revealed until a wanderer is paired up with his/her host. For wanderers, they are able to look through a list of hosts nearby their location and select a host who he/she thinks is the best fit for them. The wanderer and host then are given each other's contact information to contact each other.

How we built it

We used a basic template for a website. We then changed the HTML/CSS code to fit our needs and added more advanced features using the Sublime Text Editor.

Challenges we ran into

All the team members had a lack of prior knowledge in HTML/ CSS. Additionally, we had trouble figuring out how to store user information in database which took us 3 different attempts to resolve. Styling meaningful images/graphics was also difficult, but was ultimately achieved using Sketch to design these graphics/ logo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring how to read the spreadsheet table with Javascript (a new language for us) and printing only the necessary information out on the website with HTML is something we are proud of because of the innovative way we were able to do this. Making our own logo was also very exciting.

What we learned

This hack was a very enriching experience for all of us as we were able to learn basic HTML and CSS code as well as some additional javascript. Working together as a team was also a very fun experience that strengthened our teamwork and communication skills.