Mad Snacks | Devpost

query: steak
query: chips

Inspiration

As college students, we were concerned with how we could get the biggest bang for our buck in terms of food. Creating a tool that helps find food that is not only inexpensive, but healthy too, was something always in the back of our minds.

What it does

Our web app takes in a user's search query and runs it through several stores in the Madison area to compile a list of the cheapest options to purchase related to a given query. We intended to allow the user to select a map area and/or provide a selection of desired stores, however we were not able to implement this.

How we built it

Our frontend was built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, while our backend was built with Python, using Selenium for web scraping and SQLite for database management. Flask was the framework used to put the frontend and the backend all together.

Challenges we ran into

Manually designing a web scraper was a completely new task for our backend developers, so lots of active learning took place to scrape together something usable. During the development process, setbacks came in many forms, whether it was anti-scraping tools, completely new libraries and concepts, or just a complete creative block, but we pushed our way through to produce as best of a product as we could.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since we came into this as our first hackathon, all with relatively little project development experience, we are extremely proud of being able to put out this project at all within 24 hours. The hard work and contributions each of us made to this project represent our desire to challenge ourselves and grow as innovators. Learning how to make any use of all these new libraries and tools as best as we could is something we are all proud of.

What we learned

As a team, we learned a lot about project organization, as well as a lot about connecting both sides of development. Half of our team worked on the frontend, while the other half did the backend. Putting these two halves of development together was as much of a challenge as implementing these halves alone.

What's next for Mad Snacks

The amount of learning, combined with the 24 hour time constraint, made project progress really slow. We hope to implement our intended function of not only finding inexpensive groceries, but also offering users ideas and inspiration in making the most of these goods, whether by generating fun recipes or by offering nutritional insight. We also hope to expand the scope of our project instead of limiting to the several websites that we were able to collect information from.