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From paws to pets. Find your FURever family
Inspiration
Initially, wanted use the Tinder API as an outline for a pet adoption application. Because to adopt a pet, the potential adoptor must fill out applications in order to express and show at least some of the basic qualifications all adoptors must have. After successfully signing up, the potential app will first use geological location tags from the user to bring up databases of local and nearby adoption centers near the user. Because users generally are attracted to looks first, multiple pictures of the animals up for adoption will be displayed – similar to Tinder’s current profile outline. If the user is interested, he or she may swipe left or right to display interest or disinterest in the animals shown. If the user is interested in a particular animal, he or she may contact the animal shelter to further check for qualifications and set up in person interviews to see if the user is not only qualified but also if the user and the potential animals are a good match. Although this application may seem a bit tedious, I hope for this application to not only help speed up the adoption process, but also make it more accessible and less tedious to those who are interested in adopting. To incorporate our project with HackTech, instead of just using the Tinder API, we also tried to use Twilio to send messages to the users to have a more expedited response time.
What it does
This web app allows users to enter their personal information and preferences for adoptable pets, and then sends the user pictures and information about the adoptable pets (at nearby animal shelters and humane societies) that match the user based on their met qualifications via text message. The information provided for each pet includes a short description, type and breed of animal, its name and age, and a pictures. Different shelters generally have different requirements for potential owners (such as age, backyard size, etc) for different animals and breeds. Our app, Pettind, thus speeds up the adoption process by eliminating animals that the user is not qualified to adopt and by eliminating animals that don’t meet the criteria of what the user desires. Currently, the database contains animals including dogs, cats, and rabbits. If user does not meet any criteria for current pets, then a message will be sent to the user telling him/her of this.
How I built it
For the front end, we created forms consisting of different questions for users to fill out. We implemented this with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. On the back end we wrote Python scripts to process the form data and determine eligible pet owners. We then sent the eligible pet owners a text and image message using Twilio's TwiML API.
Challenges I ran into
Initially, we struggled to set up Twilio because we couldn't quite understand a few technical aspects in respects the systems and severs. In addition, not all of our team members were very familiar with Python which resulted in some work time being lost overall. Listening to GET requests was also quite the struggle, but because we invested in making sure all team members are comfortable with Python and or HTML enough to efficiently work but was not too much of a problem. Another challenge we ran into was with the domain name. Although we were able to register the domain, we were unable to make a account to manage the domain or have access to do so.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Teamwork, Organisation, Compromise, Socialized with and without each other because we are all new, Very Collaborative, Trouble shooting
What I learned
Because different team members started off knowing different languages, we made sure to utilize everyones distinct skill sets
What's next for Pettind
As for the next steps of our web app, Pettind, we would like to issues a command in text messages for users so that they can quickly reply to indicate which pets they are interested in and contact the organizations that the animals are currently held at. We would also like to incorporate a way to directly grab information from the online websites of nearby animal shelters.
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