Inspiration
Being someone who works and goes to school full time, I find grocery shopping and meal-prepping time-consuming. I wanted to create an app that would solve this.
What it does
The idea is to enter your location, enter your budget and dietary restrictions, and the app will use gemini to generate some recipes for you based on the shopping preferences.
How we built it
It uses next.js, react, and typescript for the frontend. Gemini API generates the personalized meals, Google Maps API finds nearby grocery stores. OpenAI's codex was used to speed up development.
Challenges we ran into
There were a lot of challenges. Some still unsolved due to the time-constraint. I wanted it to pull actual prices from grocery stores but the API integration for that would take a lot more time than I had. Connecting the frontend and backend were also challenging and consumed most of the time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Very proud of the project in general. I learned a ton working on this project to integrate multiple APIs and potentially solve a very real-world problem for a large segment of the population. Fixing the APIs, the frontend/backend issues when they were not working was very satisfying.
What we learned
Learned deeply about full-stack application development and the limitations of time on your scope. With just 24 hours a clear and minimal scope seems to be more important than trying to create something too ambitious but maybe not completable in the timeframe.
What's next for shopmate
There is still a lot to be done with the app (Which is great, it means lots of good ideas but just not enough time). The vision I had for this app was kind of a smart "one-click" app where you could literally just input your information and it would do everything for you from start to finish, including payments and delivery. That, however will require a lot more time.
Built With
- codex
- gemini
- google-maps
- nextjs
- react
- typescript
