GrocerEase | Devpost

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GrocerEase was born an hour into HackGT, after we talked to NCR about their coding challenge. From what we knew about NCR, that they dealt primarily with transactional data, we planned to use their APIs to develop a predictive application that would consolidate a user's transaction history (e.g. items bought, frequency and date of buying, stores visited, etc.) and offer suggestions on future food purchases. That idea was quickly halted when we discovered there wasn't enough past consumer data to develop a sufficient understanding of their buying patterns, forcing us to shift our focus to a problem that more heavily affects us college students. We often struggle to find time or know how to plan meals for the week and what ingredients to buy. GrocerEase remedied that by having the customer focus more of recipes when going to the grocery store rather than individual ingredients.

The core functionality revolves around changing the meaning behind going to the grocery store. Instead of struggling to plan meals or know what ingredients are needed to make the meal, GrocerEase offers a simplistic UI that allows users to search for specific meals. Through additional APIs, our app would extract recipes related to that search and display them for the user, at which point they could add them to their cart or not. When a recipe is added to their cart, it's creating a shopping list of ingredients for them to use as they shop. Additional features allow them to put in their current inventory at home, which the application will take into account when determining what new ingredients need to be bought.

Our project started by creating a basic web application with JavaScript to bring together most of the core UI functionality and backed processing with API accessing and control flow. We then transitioned this application to mobile applications because this made more sense for a customer in a grocery store, so we used the TypeScript backend language for Ionic to create seamless iOS and Android applications with the same features as the web app.

There were a lot of challenges during these 36 hours. Being deprived of sleep didn't make them any easier to tackle, either. We ran into conceptual challenges when it came to creating an initial layout for the application, technical challenges with learning how to convert to TypeScript and using Ionic, and basic debugging problems. Because we came in with very little past hackathon experience or a clear idea for a project, we often found ourselves taking unproductive tangents or struggling more frequently than others.

Despite the challenges, we are most proud of the work we did complete. While GrocerEase is far from finished, coming out of these strenuous 36 hours with something tangible and working is exciting. We are also proud of how we were able to overcome the various challenges we faced to develop this application.

Again, when coming to a hackathon, you expect not to sleep much, and, as such, you expect it to be more difficult as time goes on to stay motivated and cognitively present in the project. We learned how to adapt to that tiredness, focusing on larger aspects of the project immediately after rest breaks when we were more awake and work on smaller, cosmetic problems during the late hours.

GrocerEase was something we simply came up with this weekend, and we definitely see the worthwhile benefit in it. If someone else sees that too, we would love to continue working on it, making it better and ultimately implementing all the other features we didn't get to so far. Otherwise, for right now, we will be taking some time away from GrocerEase, although it's highly probable we'll revisit it in the near future!