Inspiration/What it does
Each year, the University of Delaware wastes many meal swipes and dining points. Our aim for this project developed during HenHacks 2023 was to support the local UD community by designing a seamless platform for users to request and accept food from other users via points requests and meal swipes. Another topic we wanted to cover was giving back to the community by allowing students to use points or meal swipes on food that will be donated to local homeless shelters as many students have excess points and swipes at the end of a semester. We also wanted to help better connect the UD community via UD share by having it act as a central hub for things such as events and announcements. Overall this project had the goal of giving back to those in need and bringing the local UD community closer together.
How we built it
We built this project using the Django framework, HTML, CSS, Python, and quite a few Django packages and python libraries. We used open source code as a basic template and modified/added files so the webapp would fit our purposes. We also used a database known as sqlite3 that came with the basic Django framework.
Challenges we ran into
A couple challenges we faced were setting up virtual environments and how they interacted with version control. This took us a couple hours to figure out as we were not sure if Github would interact with the virtual environments we needed or if it even needed to in the first place. Eventually we came to the conclusion that it did not need to interact with each of our virtual environments. Another challenge we faced was with Django and how rigid it was with its prebuilt forms/methods.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One thing we are proud of is that we were able to learn how to use and manipulate the Django framework in less than 24 hours. Another thing we were proud of doing was using Python instead of JavaScript to create a webapp. We also got much better at debugging problems in our code and fixing version control errors that occurred due to merge conflicts. Another thing we learned was how to directly query a database through Django and the terminal/command line interface, we then learned how to display this information directly to our website.
What we learned
We learned the easy and quick to use frameworks for building webapps, such as Django, have a major downside in the sense that they are hard to customize due to many built in features. This means it is very hard to change certain aspects of your webapp as you are using prebuilt features that come with Django. A great example of this would be trying to create dropdown menus as the prebuilt Django forms were not very malleable. So if we wanted to make custom forms or even slightly different ones, we would have to write our own from the ground up.
What's next for UD Share
Hopefully we can continue to work on this project in the future and fix any bugs/issues that came up during HenHacks. We would add many more features and convenient actions that would allow for a much smoother and streamlined experience than it would currently provide. The ideal goal would be to keep working on UD Share so that one day we could maybe scale it up to a much larger level.
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