Skills
Inspiration
A friend/co-worker of mine had an idea based on an article he had read about how farmers were having a hard time finding buyers for their crops. In turn, farmers were throwing out tons of wasted food. His idea was an app that allowed farmers to sell directly to consumers, through a delivery network similar to that of Uber Eats. Although skeptical at first, I felt that it would be a good use of my time in quarantine to work on this project.
What it does
Through a simplistic easy to use app, consumers can buy goods through local farms to be rapidly delivered. Farmers can quickly set up a page to list available goods, with orders and delivery fully taken care of by the app. Drivers can sign up to work as they please delivering the goods.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest aspects of this app would be the routing and delivery system. In order for that to be accomplished by such a small team, we looked at different cloud services. Google Maps offered both client-side libraries and ones for calculating routes on the back end at the lowest price of the options we looked at, but would still produce a pretty large bill if we ever got to scale. The other challenge with the routing system was getting data with which to test it. Ultimately, our tests would show whether or not this whole project would even be worthwhile in terms of profit and costs. There were also potential legal concerns regarding food poisoning and delivery drivers possibly stealing goods.
What I learned
Creating an app using Flutter was the biggest takeaway for me as well as doing some work in Golang, although the majority of the back end for this project was being handled by the person I was working with.