Inspiration
We've always been concerned about the environment, and have always wondered what the everyday-person can do. Trying to help the environment alone can feel hopeless, but we don't want it to feel that way.
We noticed that grocery stores have a multitude of product varieties, some more friendly for the environment than others. We wanted an app to help choose between all the different products.
What it Does
With just a simple barcode scan, you can easily get an EcoScore of any product on the shelf. It relies on crowdsourced data from short 5-question surveys.
How We Built it
Our front-end website uses ReactJS to dynamically style the webpage and NodeJS + Express for the backend. We had half our team focus on the backend and the other half focus on the frontend.
Our database was based on PostgreSQL and hosted on Render.
Challenges We Ran Into
- Scanning Barcodes
- Finding a reliable React API that could scan barcodes was difficult - a lot of them are outdated and slow.
- Dealing w/ Database & API
- We are relatively new to using the PostgreSQL and Express, so there was a learning curve, especially when we had to host it online.
Accomplishments We're Proud Of
Getting the barcode to scan was a difficult task, so we are really excited that we got it working. We're also proud of how well the UI and flow of the website works.
What We Learned
Express, PostgreSQL
What's Next?
In the future we would like to adjust the UI to work better on mobile devices, add web-scraping capabilities to get a more accurate score, and use artificial intelligence to ensure scores are reasonable and accurate.
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