Sneaky

Providing Free Food Access All Across Campus.

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Inspiration

We all grow up hearing the words, “there ain’t no such thing as free lunch.” In this project, we want to challenge this idea by taking advantage of all the free food opportunities across CMU campus. Events and club meetings always provide free food to attract people, which opens up the possibility. We design a script to automatically aggregate free food information on campus and display it on our SNEAKY website. It is mutually beneficial for both parties as event sponsors or clubs get more attention and students get free food.

What it does

It displays all the events in student emails that provide “free food”

How I built it

Back-end: We get access to gmail accounts with imaplib and fetch emails containing free food information and store all emails into a text file for parsing and future development. We then extract information, such as event name, time, and location, using regular expressions and store them in a dictionary. This data would then be converted into a JSON file and sent to the front-end for display.

Challenges I ran into

  • Back-end: We encountered some obstacles when we were trying to determine the method to extract the date and location of the event. We finally decided to use regex and spent an hour or so researching and reading introductory documents on regex. Nailed it the next day.
  • Front-end: JavaScript is*TRASH, it’s simply **TRASH*.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Chiver and Vpollo, our two front-end people, are completely new to web application development, so they spent the first 6 hours studying HTML, JavaScript, and flask.
  • Our back-end members acquired new skill sets such as email scraping and crawling.

What I learned

“There IS such a thing as free lunch.”

What's next for Sneaky

  • Augment our database: Currently, our data comes from one email account, but the free food information one can - Augment our database: Currently, our data comes from one email account, but the free food information one can receive is limited. In the future, we want to write a script to incorporate information from various email accounts and Bridge.
  • Mobile App: Right now, our application only works well on PC. In the future, we hope to launch a mobile version as well.
  • LAUNCH!!!: Currently, due to insufficient funds, we cannot deploy our web application to a remote server. In the future, we hope all CMU students can have access to this SNEAKY tool.
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