ALIGN

Inspiration

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill, as people are locked up in self-quarantine, they are only allowed out for essential supplies. However, grocery stores have now become a hotspot as hundreds of people lineup during the week to restock their diminishing supplies. This makes replenishing your necessities a dangerous task as it puts you at risk of catching COVID-19. Seeing this oversight by grocery stores we decided to solve this problem with ALIGN.

What it does

ALIGN is a web-based application that allows grocery stores to better control the number of people within the store while reducing the number of people waiting in line by implementing a virtual queuing system. We encourage people to queue up online and show up to the store when it is their time to enter. This eliminates the need to wait in line outside the store and allows customers to wait in their car or in another safe location.

How it works

A user simply opens our app when they want to go grocery shopping and enter the location they would like to shop. Once a location is selected he/she can queue up virtually. Our app will offer real-time updates on their position in line and when it’s almost their turn we notify the user via text.

How we built it

Using Google Maps API we implemented a map system that marks the grocery stores using our platform. Information such as name, phone number, and party size is taken in from our front-end and sent to our back-end database using MongoDB. We use Twilio to send an SMS text once it’s their turn to enter the store. Our script is run every minute using Cron to ensure we are notifying our users as soon as it is their turn.

Challenges we ran into

Finalizing minor logistics behind our web-application (management with physical lines, methods of notification, sizes/types of industries, etc)
Solidifying our idea and accurately translating into functional code
Difficulty deploying to Heroku
Adapting to a virtual hackathon without being able to physically work with teammates

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Being able to complete a virtual internship while balancing other priorities in our lives
Helping the community by making grocery shopping a little easier during this crisis, while promoting social distancing by reducing crowds

What we learned

How to use MongoDB and Mongoose for the first time
Further enhanced our knowledge in creating an ExpressJS application with a ReactJS frontend
How to effectively use git commands
Learned Twilio to send SMS text messages
How to create a REST API

What's next for ALIGN

Implementing a feature where we can keep track of how many people are in the store
Implement a machine-learning algorithm to track customer's average shopping time
Incorporating other grocery stores and other types, and sizes of industries into the application
Enhancing the UI/UX
Creating an online shopping system