turnip - food was made for sharing.

Inspiration

After reading about the possible projects, we decided to work with Velo by Wix on a food tech project. What are two things that we students never get tired of? Food and social media! We took some inspiration from Radish and GoodReads to throw together a platform for hungry students. Have you ever wanted takeout but not been sure what you're in the mood for? turnip is here for you!

What it does

turnip is a website that connects local friends with their favourite food takeout spots. You can leave reviews and share pictures, as well as post asking around for food recommendations. turnip also keeps track of your restaurant wishlist and past orders, so you never forget to check out that place your friend keeps telling you about. With integrated access to partnered restaurants, turnip would allow members to order right on the site seamlessly and get food delivered for cheap. Since the whole design is built around sharing (sharing thoughts, sharing secrets, sharing food), turnip would also allow users to place orders together, splitting the cost right at payment to avoid having to bring out the calculator and figure out who owes who what.

How we built it

We used Velo by Wix for the entire project, with Carol leading the design of the website while Amir and Tudor worked on the functionality. We also used Wix's integrated "members" area and forum add-ons to implement the "feed".

Challenges we ran into

One of the bigger challenges we had to face was that none of us had any experience developing full-stack, so we had to learn on the spot how to write a back-end and try to implement it into our website. It was honestly a lot of fun trying to "speedrun" learning the ins and outs of Javascript. Unfortunately, Wix made the project even more difficult to work on as it doesn't natively support multiple people working on it at the same time. As such, our plan to work concurrently fell through and we had to "pass the baton" when it came to working on the website and keep ourselves busy the rest of the time. Lastly, since we relied on Wix add-ons we were heavily limited in the functionality we could implement with Velo. We still created a few functions; however, much of it was already covered by the add-ons and what wasn't was made very difficult to access without rewriting the functionality of the modules from scratch. Given the time crunch, we made do with what we had and had to restrict the scope for McHacks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super proud of how the design of the site came together, and all the art Carol drew really flowed great with the look we were aiming for. We're also very proud of what we managed to get together despite all the challenges we faced, and the back-end functionality we implemented.

What we learned

Our team really learned about the importance of scope, as well as about the importance of really planning out the project before diving right in. Had we done some research to really familiarize ourselves with Wix and Velo we might have reconsidered the functionalities we would need to implement (and/or implemented them ourselves, which in hindsight would have been better), or chosen to tackle this project in a different way altogether!

What's next for Turnip

We have a lot of features that we really wanted to implement but didn't quite have the time to. A simple private messaging feature would have been great, as well as fully implementing the block feature (sometimes we don't get along with people, and that's okay!). We love the idea that a food delivery service like Radish could implement some of our ideas, like the social media/recommendations/friends feature aspect of our project, and would love to help them do it.

Overall, we're extremely proud of the ideas we have come up with and what we have managed to implement, especially the fact that we kept in mind the environmental impact of meal deliveries with the order sharing.

Built With

• javascript
• velo
• wix