The Goldilocks Initiative

Inspiration

We were inspired by the prevalence of food insecurity in our lives today. As supply chains weaken and increasingly greater fertile lands become deserts or wastelands, the need for prudent and efficient distribution of food, particularly for the needy, becomes an increasingly important challenge that we wanted to tackle.

What it does

The project aims to facilitate ease of transport for people who have extra food and want to provide food, and people that are willing to distribute food to the community. As a large majority of food waste(from restaurants, grocery stores, hospitals, schools, etc.) is perfectly safe and protected for donations, we believed it would be useful to provide a simple interface to donate and distribute food.

How we built it

We built it using standard web development frameworks such as React, Express.js, Node.js, and Mongodb. Other useful tools were Positionstack API, which was able to give us latitude and longitude through address.

Challenges we ran into

The project took a long time to finally begin, as web development was a fairly new topic to the majority of people on our team. The main challenge of this hackathon, then, was to learn and be able to apply the powerful technologies used in industry development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the end, we built our project without any major templates, able to complete a mostly fully functional back-end with web authentication using JWTs and express JS. We were also able to develop a small front-end system through React which seemed simple at first, but was actually quite nice to complete.

What we learned

We learned a lot about standard design and coding practice and how to better prepare ourselves for web development challenges in the future.

What's next for The Goldilocks Initiative

Originally, we had planned on implementing many more ideas, such as an algorithm for optimizing the distribution of food using demand forecasting from LSTM neural networks, using APIs to detect location and optimize travel time, and possibly even connecting hopeful volunteers to simple trips to deliver food, which would be implemented next as a part of this project.

Built With

• express.js
• javascript
• mongodb
• node.js
• positionstackapi
• react