Access

Access is a web app that strives to reduce food waste by providing a platform to distribute expiring food.

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Inspiration

"Even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world." Source

Focusing on the environment track, our team decided to address the global issue of food waste. In particular, we focused on how restaurants can find new use for their expiring food. Instead of going to waste, we thought that it would be beneficial to make the food publicly accessible, particularly for low-income students or those living in poverty. This has potential to reduce the costs of food production on the environment and to feed those in need.

What it does

Access provides a platform for restaurants to sign in as donors and publicly post what food they have available. Low income users can use this web app to view postings in their region. Users search by region, and can see the donor, location, a picture, and description of the food.

How we built it

We set up our developer environment using XAMPP, which is a popular PHP environment using MariaDB and Apache Web Server. To collaborate, we set up a Github repository and Teletype for Atom. We used Bootstrap and Awesomplete for our user interface and auto complete functions. We used PHP and MySQL to allow us to hold and interact with data.

Challenges we ran into

Our team is made up of students from Cabrillo College, San Jose State, and UC Berkeley. This gave us different perspectives on how our project code should be structured. Our first couple of hours in development, we bounced between wanting to develop in PHP and in Django. As we eventually settled on PHP, it took a long time to find our groove.

The first two thirds of the hackathon were grueling to work through. We often ran into roadblocks, or realized that the way we designed the web application was not up to our standard. As we realized the scope of our project, we struggled with efficiently designing the database structure. Around 4:30am, our team was emotionally tired and exhausted with the small amounts of progress we made. It was hard to work on our project when breakthroughs were so few and far between. This lead to a project reboot in the middle of the night. Although this was initially disheartening, we were soon making breakthroughs in the next three hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Breaking through our initial challenges was our team highlight of the weekend. We were finally able to develop our core functionality and user experience at a rapid pace.

We were able to develop this web application using vanilla PHP, CSS, and Javascript. We are proud of our login and registration functionality for users that we made ourselves. We set up and created functionality for data insertion in our MySQL database. We learned and implemented libraries to help our development, such as Awesomplete and Bootstrap 4.

What we learned

By not using any frameworks, our team was pushed to gain a deeper knowledge of Javascript and PHP, as well as core web functions such as user sessions and interacting with a MySQL database.

We also learned how to work as a team in unfamiliar and stressful situations. It was helpful to be able to play ping pong and get some time to step back from our work when needed!

What's next for Access

If Access were to take off, we would like to see distribution points in areas with high amounts of food waste, for example, areas with a high density of restaurants. Creating a system of trust is also essential to the growth for Access. We would look to create a verification system to make sure both donors and users were trustable.

Thank you to the HackDavis organizers and volunteers for a great event!

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