mthong
commented
7 years ago This sounds like a super cool project.
Would you be able to come to Code for San Jose's hack night this Thursday, March 9 to recruit some additional developers to join you?
If you can't come to a hack night in the near future, we can introduce this project in our Slack community to drum up interested developers.
rootCause87
Background
The San Jose Public Library runs a summer program where they provide three meals a day + snacks to children at seven of their branches. The meals come from the YMCA, and left over meals can be served to adults, but the library must pay the YMCA for any meals that don't go to a child.
Because of the above restriction, the library must keep diligent documentation of each meal, and the coordinator sends a weekly report for each library. For the past two summers, a volunteer was needed just for the task of filling out the paperwork at each library at every meal - keeping track of how many new meals were received, left over, how many went to kids, etc. Not only does this mean that the volunteer can't help with other tasks, but it is also creates over 8,000 pages of paperwork per month. Keeping up on the paperwork is a grueling task.
State of the app and current tasks
Last October, some friends and I hacked together a software solution during a 30-hour hackathon. We have since delivered the mobile and web app to the library, but since this was a quick hack, there are still some tasks that need to be taken care of before the meal program starts back up in May. I am currently the only developer still working with them on the web portion of the project, and my time is limited, plus this seems like a great project for CfSJ to be involved in as it benefits our public libraries. Here are some of the tasks that the meal program coordinator's team and I came up with that I think can be resolved in time for the summer:
Deprecate mobile app and make web submission form more responsive instead [JavaScript, CSS] -- Would remove the need for a new apk every time code changes -- Would solve the issue where not every library has an android phone/tablet available
Add a 'send PDF' button (function already exists in backend, just need to add a button to trigger it on the UI) [JavaScript, CSS] -- I initially make a cron job that runs on the server to email weekly PDFs for each library to the coordinator -- coordinator would rather be able to have these sent on demand
Front-end: tool to add new libraries from the UI. Also need to fetch library names dynamically instead of hard-coding them in the app [Mongo, JavaScript, CSS] -- Will need to create a new table in the database that stores all the library names
PDF reports: add more info (such as meals wasted) to the report
Security: add a login for the dashboard, add a key or something to the GET and POST calls [NodeJS, ExpressJS]