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Self-Made Logo
Inspiration
Our project is directly focused around being a good neighbor to the community in a time of need. During the pandemic, struggle has become familiar to the majority of communities across the globe. However, our project, with the help of NCR’s API software, is aimed to relieve the stress experienced by local businesses through the encouragement of purchasing their products over dominating companies, like Amazon. This project was inspired by the sense of urgency to find a method to somehow aid a group of people that are struggling due to the effects of the pandemic, our target group being your local entrepreneurs.
What it does
Our team designed and implemented a Chrome extension that, when shopping on Amazon, searches the inventories of local businesses for the same or similar products as what you are looking to buy on Amazon. By parsing through your search bar input from the URL of the website’s search results, the extension searches for each keyword within the inventory of local businesses and prints the results. Then, the user can continue, with the press of a button, to a shopping cart where their items can be found. Here, the user can adjust the quantity of the items if they want more than one or decide they do not want any.
How we built it
We designed our Chrome extension, imagining the easiest way for people to view their local business options and select to shop with the press of a button (literally). We used JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for functionality and node.js for server-side communication to a server script hosted on Glitch. Python was also used for connecting and utilizing the NCR API.
Challenges we ran into
Neither member of our team had much experience with web development and had only been exposed to JavaScript and HTML/CSS briefly in the past. This project put out noses to the grindstone as a Google Chrome extension is a web feature, unavoidably involving the aforementioned languages in its implementation and design. A lot of our time was spent researching syntax, functionality, etc., but through this practice, we learned a lot about the languages, like how you can easily add elements to an array of an unspecified size in JavaScript as compared to Java and C++, which was a bit shocking. We also learned how difficult it can be to learn someone’s API in one night as trying to understand how to incorporate Python scripts with JavaScript and HTML/CSS at 4 AM did not entirely set us up for maximum success.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to have created something that we believe could be used in real-life applications to help the Athens community and others with small to midsized businesses. We are also proud of the CS knowledge we gained as neither of us knew much about WebDev coming into this hackathon, and we enjoyed doing it despite roadblocks!
What we learned
By attending the How to Build Your Own API workshop, led by Paul, we were exposed to the world of creating and using APIs. This was very helpful as we had no idea where to start with APIs prior to the workshop. We also discovered Glitch through Paul's workshop and utilized it to host a server for out project.
What's next for UGA HACKS 6 - NCR Challenge
Moving forward, we would like to take our site that we created with NCR’s API and implement their Catalog API to store both customer and store inventory. We would also like to prompt the user for their zip code to base a larger database of local stores off of. The business radius would be based off of your walking, biking, and/or driving distance.
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