Inspiration
Uchews was started in 2018 with one simple goal in mind, to make finding food easy, enjoyable, and safe for anyone with dietary restrictions. With 1 in 13 children suffering from a food allergy and millions of others being affected by some sort of medical dietary restriction, the need for Uchews simple and intuitive system is very clear.
What it does
Uchews allows the user to take control of their lifestyle with a custom build-a-profile section that caters directly to the users needs. Simply select medical, dietary, or otherwise personal food restrictions and let Uchews do the rest! Restaurant choices will be listed based on which preferences set (for demo purposes, we have a few results pre-set).
How we built it
Using PHP, Bootstrap, and a cloud-based IDE hosted by AWS, our team set out to create a web-based application that would allow users to create a profile for their personal restrictions and dietary needs. Our previous work with PHP and MySQL databases allowed us to structure a demo-ready site that could be easily converted into a site that functions with a complete database.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges involved deciding what would be seen as "core experiences" from our potential users and judges. 36 hours only leaves so much room for debugging and making the site look pretty. We settled on a site that functions as if the database has been complete and the user profile has been set. That way judges see more of our vision for the app.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team is proud of the vision and place that this application could head. We believe that this is one of the most practical and market-ready applications at this year's VolHacks, and we can't wait to pitch it to the judges.
What we learned
During this project, we grew in our ability to orient our programming focus to a core-out strategy. Beginning with the core experience allowed us to expand outward from there, as well as categorize specific features as necessary/not necessary based on which part of the project we were on.
What's next for Uchews
We'd love to get feedback from potential users, as well as the judges! We'll continue to flesh out the site as a more functional profile-based app. Once we have our database up and running, data entries are going to be key. Using filters to eliminate certain search results will give users the power with regards to their specific food restrictions.
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