Meal Tally

Inspiration

We wish we could solve hunger around the world, and what better place to start than home. When we heard the pitch from the San Jose Public Library on their effort in helping serve food to the needy local children and adults, it immediately struck a chord with us.

What it does

Built an app that will help the San Jose Public Library volunteers by saving them a significant amount of time and effort in dealing with their paperwork. The volunteers must fill out upwards of 8,000 pages per month in order to meet their accountability requirements. In addition to lowering their monthly paper count to negligible, our mobile app will enable a much quicker check-in process for their customers and will give their volunteers more bandwidth, so they can be available for serving more people more food effectively. In conclusion, the mobile and web app will take up all the grunt work of data entry and reporting which will reduce significant amount of paperwork and manual effort.

How we built it

We had a lot of skill sets for a small team of four engineers. We were able to cover mobile development with Kotlin, front-end web-dev with AngularJS, and back-end with nodeJS to create a responsive web app that can be used from virtually any device.

We also created a neat Android based App for volunteers to easily check-in children and adults as they walk in to get the meals.

And of course there is sweat equity :)

Challenges we ran into

Crazy errors in posting data from our android app to the data store through our backend service
Finding time to sleep was so hard.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we are building would be put to use from the get go.
It will positively impact the lives of hundreds of hungry people over and over through the years to come.
We WOW'd our customers with our mobile app demo.

What we learned

Solving impactful problems using cool technology.
Doing neat UX on an Android App

What's next for Meal Tally

The web and mobile app are all set to be used by the San Jose Library. The app can optionally be enabled for iOS Support.

Built With

android-design-library
angular.js
bootstrap
kotlin
mongodb
node.js

Submitted to

SVCC Opportunity Hack

Created by

Helped put the team of like-minded enthusiastic peeps together. Contributed as the lead developer and helped code in node.js and troubleshoot issues. Defined the end-to-end product and experience through interview insights from the non-profit organization. Designed the mobile and backend APIs, defined a flexible mongo schema for the whole product, automated the entire workflow. I also helped create the UX and interaction design for the mobile app.

Gagan Maheshwari
Polyglot who is passionate, informed and knowledgeable about cutting edge frameworks, design patterns and programming languages.
Contributed to all parts of this high-powered overnight startup, to build a working experience.
Working from requirements to
UX, building the solution on MEAN stack, closely working with team. Together we Rock

Mak Bhatamrekar
Coded the APIs that allow our mobile app and reporting dashboard to send and retrieve information from our mongo database. Also integrated the nodejs modules that helped us automate the weekly data flows which had been costing the library volunteers a lot of time energy.

Natalie Romano
Developed the complete user-interface and conceptualized the whole user-experience on the mobile application. Focused a lot of effort into creating beautiful designs and transitions within the application. Also worked on the important feature of sending information to the database. I took advantage of Android's design library to optimize the user-experience. In addition to that, I choose to use Kotlin over Java for development. This choice is due to Kotlin being more pragmatic, readable, and funner to program compared to Java.

Johnny Nguyen