Inspiration
-Sustainability.
-Convenience.
-Looking for a challenge where we could all learn.
-applicable - useful outside of the hackathon.
What it does
from the readme: " Stamp is a Hackathon coding project that digitizes reward cards eliminating the need for physical cards, and providing a convenient and eco-friendly solution for managing loyalty programs. It helps customers keep track of loyalty programs, earn and redeem reward points and receive personalized offers and promotions, while merchants are able to benefit from real-time analytics to track purchases, improve their loyalty programs and benefit customer experience. Stamp simplifies loyalty program management for both customers and merchants. "
How we built it
We started this project beginning with the user journey and what main problem we wanted to tackle: the insurmountable number of meaningless loyalty cards lying around in customers' wallets, never to be found, rewards lost. From there it was clear that we wanted to provide a lightweight interface where customers can provide a QR code associated with the store that can easily be used to redeem points and provide analytics for businesses. The simple interface makes it easy for businesses to manage their data and be able to easily see customer rewards and summary statistics. So naturally, we decomposed the project into smaller subproblems and began to tackle them step by step. Getting the requests to talk to the database, React to render graphs, navbars, etc., generating an image of a coffee shop loyalty card on apple wallet, and getting every element to communicate with each other and get as many features as we intended implemented.
Challenges we ran into
lack of sleep
Alex: Being a pure mathematics student and this being my first ever Hackathon I was initially intimidated to embark on a project of this technical magnitude. I have worked a lot with python but I had never worked on creating a backend using frameworks like flask and SQLAlchemy, so it was big challenge for me to wrap my head around handling requests and responses while trying to integrate the results with the frontend to produce a seamless system.
Dugald: Given that this was my first hackathon, I was looking forward to learning new things. Although I have experience with HTML and CSS, I had to learn React during the process in order to help embed the front end with the rest of the system. This proved challenging in the environment but, after a learning curve, I managed to create a satisfactory front end.
Youning: React is hard, speed learning React is even harder!! But good opportunity to have a intro to Frontend in the context of web application through this hackathon experience :)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Alex: I am very proud of the voodoo magic behind the backend, being honest it's magic to me that a qr code can be read and the database is immediately updated or read, and both frontends are updated simultaneously. I am very proud of how effectively we split up the project and had a team working on the customer front end (apple wallet), another team on the administrator front end (using react) and another team working on the backend (python - flask/sqlalchemy), and even though some of us were complete noobs to hackathons (especially me) we somehow manage to pull something together in 24h that has promise.
What we learned
We've all worked on very different problems and have come across a very big chunk of web development. Yet I think one of the most useful things we have learned is how to work effectively on different problems independently while still keeping track of the original goal.
What's next for Stamp
This hackathon has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience for us as there were challenges on every level of experience our group had. Hopefully, we will be able to add new features so that this might become a useful service that can cut down the number of physical cards, increase the number of free coffees, and help local businesses grow by providing what will hopefully be a useful tool.
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