Hack Dibner
Annual New York University library hackathon open to all students
Timeline
September - December, 2021
Team Role
I worked on the user experience research, UI/UX, written proposals, and presentation. I also project managed, organizing and creating target goals to ensure project deliverables.
Inspiration
Our team loves food and we want to help other students who love food too. We recognized the difficulties surrounding food during the COVID pandemic that can easily be eliminated with an application.
What it does
OurFood is a website application in which a student can list the ingredients they have and receive recipe suggestions as a result. The student can then scroll through recipe suggestions and choose one they like based on preference for cook time and recipe photo. This will send them to the website of the recipe where they can learn more and get cooking!
How we built it
Front-End: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Back-End: Python
PyMongo to connect to the MongoDB
Flask for developing the web application
Google App Engine as our cloud computing platform
Accomplishments
Our team is incredibly proud of our project! We are happy to have been able to simultaneously work on front and back-end of this website application and then successfully be able to link them together and function properly.
Challenges
Our team faced quite a few challenges. We at first attempted using Firebase as our database, however we ran into issues collecting substrings. So after many attempts we ended up switching over to MongoDB. None of the team members had previously worked with JavaScript, so we had to learn that from scratch to incorporate it into our project.
Take aways
I've learned a lot about project management over the span of a few months. We learned important skills in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript for the front end part, as well as Python and Flask for the back-end, and how to incorporate PyMongo, MongoDB and Google App Engine!