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QuickSand landing page.
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Easily find a meal based on time, location, and dietary restrictions.
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Fresh, home-made meals.
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Sell meals and extra portions to other users.
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Edit your profile to filter based on dietary restrictions.
Inspiration
My partner Max Musing and I are Software Engineering students entering our second year of study in September. While discussing our living situations with many of our friends, we came to the realization that most students were in one of two camps. Either they had lots of experience when it comes to cooking, or absolutely none at all. As Max and I are unfortunately in the not-so-experienced camp, we tried to find a way to leverage this disparity in cooking capability between students. We wanted to find a way for the more experienced to make extra money from their cooking, while allowing the less experienced to get a relatively cheap meal. Thus the idea for QuickSand was born.
What it does
Getting Started
QuickSand is a mobile web application that allows users to buy and sell food from each other. Upon signing up, one can browse all the local food listings, or post their own. A food listing contains a name, image, description, price and meet-up time/location as set by the poster. Selecting to purchase a listing notifies the merchant that their listing has been purchased, and gives them your basic profile information. Within the Profile tab, you can set any dietary requirements you have, such as Vegan or Gluten-free food.
It's a date!
Once you've confirmed a purchase, all you have to do is meet the merchant at the time/location you agreed upon. If it was not specified that the food would be brought in a container you can keep, make sure you bring your own. Be punctual, bring exact change (if possible) and chow down!
Becoming a QuickSand Merchant
Under the 'Sell' tab, you can view your current listings, or add a new one if you haven't already. You aren't limited to any number of listings, so go crazy! Upon selecting 'Add', all you have to do is fill out the 'New Listing' form, and you're all set. You'll be notified if someone has selected to buy your listing. Please make sure you respect your buyer by being on time, and bringing exactly the meal you promised.
How we built it
Caffeine-fueled and Django-powered, QuickSand is a relatively straightforward mobile web application. The backend is governed by a database that contains users, and meals. The buy and sell tabs display various database queries, filtered depending on the current time and your preset dietary restrictions. Any meal that becomes purchased or passes its meet-up time will automatically be set to expired, and will no longer be displayed. Creating a listing adds it to the database, making is visible to everyone except for yourself. The frontend was developed using HTML/CSS/Sass/Javascript with the focus of being mobile-first.
Challenges we ran into
Originally, this project was intended as a means to learn iOS app development, Swift and Xcode. We unfortunately ran into multiple seemingly unfixable bugs very quickly. After spending over 6 hours bug fixing with very little progress made, we decided to back-peddle, and restart using a language we were more comfortable with. Switching to python and Django still allowed us to use the development process as a learning experience, but our basic Python skills prevented us from getting brick-walled by bugs as frequently.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Before Max and I started development, we were very excited, as this was the first project we had worked on where we felt the end result could make a real impact in the world. Seeing the finished product, we are proud to say that this hope could still ring true. We feel QuickSand could make surviving university on a budget better for all students, and for that, we're very proud.
What we learned
As we lost many precious hackathon hours trying to learn Swift, we have come to the realization that projects such as ours are excellent ways to solidify your basic knowledge of a language/framework, but are not great for working with something right out of the box.
What's next for QuickSand
We still have loads of ideas for features that could make QuickSand even better! Primarily, we want to incorporate a geolocation feature, that only shows the user food listings within a certain radius. As well, an in-app chat feature would vastly increase merchant-buyer communication, allowing for last minute location changes.
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