SlugsToGo

Tired of waiting in cafe lines before class? Now you don't have to!

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SlugsToGo came to us while waiting in a long line at the UCSC Bistro after barely securing a reservation. We felt that the process was inefficient, yet still didn’t want to miss out on the delicious food they had to offer. For college students with busy schedules, grabbing a quick bite to eat can make all the difference and that is exactly what SlugsToGo does.

Our website streamlines the process of ordering food from one of the many restaurants and cafes on campus, allowing UCSC students to manage their hectic schedules. With our platform, students can effortlessly order food in advance from their favorite on-campus cafes and restaurants. We offer a selection of 10 diverse eateries, each with a user-friendly menu navigation system. The checkout process is seamless, allowing students to choose a convenient pickup time and utilize three friendly payment methods, including SlugPoints/FlexiDollars. This service is tailored to enhance the overall dining experience for UCSC students, making it easy for them to grab a quick bite between classes without having to wait in a line.

As a team of beginners who have minimal experience with full-stack web development, we had to maximize our time and resources in order to develop our idea efficiently. After designing a basic outline in a Figma design document, we went about building the various pages with each other using VSCode’s LiveShare extension. Over the course of the hackathon, we self-taught ourselves how to build an ECommerce website with API functionality, using React, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Node.js.

One of the main challenges we ran into was when implementing the shopping cart functionality. Dealing with new APIs and errors we had never seen before as beginner full-stack developers, we had a lot of difficulty troubleshooting. At some point, we had to remake our entire GitHub repository, since some of the backend edits broke the entire program. But with a little determination and teamwork, we pushed through, and managed to submit a working project.

After spending 24+ hours working on our project, we are proud of the progress we made and how well we implemented our idea within the time frame. Each page contains important functionality and aesthetic front-end, combined to create a functional website meant to benefit the UCSC community. We were able to implement multiple complex features within this website, specifically a working shopping cart that calculates prices in real-time (including tax).

We learned a great deal about the different components that go into making a website, everything from routing paths in React to making sites more accessible. From the start with UX design to resolving git merge issues, working on this project has taught us more in the past 24 hours than watching any online tutorial would. Hands-on practice truly is the best way to pick up skills quickly, and we plan to practice this with our future projects as well.

We hope to further refine our website by implementing the menus of every restaurant and cafe at UCSC, and improving the functionality. Ultimately, the goal is to develop a viable product that we can then present to UCSC Dining. Our initial goal when creating this project was to help students maximize their time, and we plan on following through with that in the future.

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