Leftovers

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Did you know America wastes between 30%-40% of its food supply ever year? A large part of this waste is on the consumer side. Consumers in the US throw away over one hundred million pounds of food every year. With the food crisis the world is in right now, we can't afford this time of loss. That's why we built Leftovers. Leftovers is an app that ensures people don't throw away leftovers that they forgot were in the fridge. We do this by sending text notifications during peak meal times. These texts remind you about your leftovers and estimate how long it is until they expire. Hopefully, we can raise the percentage of people that actually eat their leftovers to above 20.

We are four freshman from the University of Florida starting out in Computer Science and attending this hackathon for experience and possible networking opportunities for the future. We came up with the idea about food waste because of one of our team members "Quest Course" (a humanities based perspective class) in which it focuses on human environmental decisions and actions, specifically food waste and how we are able minimalize it. The main idea of the application is to send a reminder notification by SMS to users who input their phone number and information about their leftover foods through Twilio API with authentication from Auth0 API. We went with this idea and wanted to create something in React Native or Flutter to cross-platform as a web-application on IOS and Android devices. We continued setting up the environments for a few hours on different operating systems. However, the setup environment and time restrictions, along with the gap of knowledge proved to be difficult about 12 hours in with no sleep. We soon realized that learning a new application in such a short time proved to be difficult so we had to make a change quick. We decided the next morning at 8am to switch our entire back and front end process to simple HTML front end with a Firebase backend to collect user information as well as user authentication. The front end was simple HTML and CSS and the back-end was occupied by Java and Firebase applications. Near the end of the developing process, we made a mistake with using Git and our files were duplicated and overwrote each other in the branches so we had a backup created in case something happened in which we ended up utilizing it. We were able to implement a rough sketch of what the application should have looked like on the web, although there are many bugs to be solved in the end. Given the time restrictions, we were unable to fully implement a successful application that could achieve everything we wanted to. Nonetheless, we learned a great deal about applications like Git, React, HTML, JavaScript, BASH, Ubuntu, team organization, and time management.

Old Repo: https://github.com/cslegasse/ShellHacks_Leftovers

New Repo: https://github.com/cslegasse/ShellHacks_Leftovers_Backup