Sustain the Way
Our goal is to reduce food waste and support communities by connecting them with food pantries. Our platform bridges the gap between farmers and pantries ensuring better allocation of resources.
About This Project
Our mission for Sustain the Way is to prevent food waste and food insecurity. This project was inspired by the ongoing issue of food waste and hunger. Food hunger is a problem as almost 47 million Americans face hunger, 1 in 5 are children. People struggle to find meals throught the world and farmers often discard surplus food due to distribution challenges. By creating a platform that connects farmers with food pantries in need we can reduce the waste. Our aim is to create a sustainable and food-secure future for all. This projected was created alongside Harini Solaidurairaj, Zona Noman, Asha Makwana, and Nguyet Pham. Check out our devpost submission --> https://devpost.com/software/sustaintheway
Key Features
- Find Pantries - Connects users to local food pantires to prevent food waste and food insercurity
- Learn - Join the mission! Read about STW's goals for the future!
- AI Powered Search - Ask any question in our search function to get solutions to your problems and answers to your questions!
Technologies Used
- IDE: VSCode
- Git Version Control
- openai API
- JavaScript, HTML, CSS
- Node.js
- Python
Challenges & Learnings
Challenges:
Setting up the Python 3 environment was initially challenging, but after a few searches we figured out the correct terminal commands needed to configure it properly. Once that was resolved, we used VS Code’s Live Server to continue development, which worked really well for instantly seeing changes as we coded. The biggest challenge by far was using Git and GitHub for version control. With a five person team working on different computers, certain packages were being overwritten, causing issues on some machines but not others. This made the problem difficult to identify at first. Afterward, we became much more careful about which files we pushed to GitHub and how we managed changes.
What I Learned:
This project was created for SparkHacks 2024, a campus wide event run by WiCS at UIC. It was my first time collaborating with a five others under a strict 24-hour time constraint. Even though the experience was short, I learned a lot about troubleshooting, debugging, and working efficiently under pressure. I also gained experience using online resources for HTML page layouts and learning specific CSS lines to customize the site to match our theme.
