What? Leftover – another wb app for food waste, at PayPal’s BattleHack London
When? 25th – 26th April 2015
Where? Tobacco Docks, London
Who? Paolo Rossi, myself and Sleepy
What About It?
So I came to BattleHack London with a refined variation of the idea used at MLH Landing – as in, a new web app designed to try and tackle the food waste problem. This time the target was individual businesses and retailers who have food leftover at the end of the day of their sell by date that they will be unable to sell, regardless of the state of that food, once they close shop, and so generally throw away. Whilst food banks often collect these if in large enough quantities, they generally can’t justify the logistics costs if it is only a handful of food or drink available. And so, users can sign up to Leftover to get notifications when something is reduced to clear and pay for it via the Braintree API to reserve it to collect before the day is out.
I formed a team there with the only other Edinburgh student, who was very sleep deprived from his overnight coach journey and spent a large proportion of the hack asleep, and Paolo who was a professional developer and was a lot of fun to work with and taught me a few things along the way. He was responsible for the backend in Node and Angular, while I made some awful Bootstrap front end.
For the first time in a while I was very proud of what we had eventually made – it may not have held up to the standards of some of our competitors, this was the very intense BattleHack after all and it was one of the largest hackathons I’d been to with around 50 teams (I think) – but for two of us, balancing our time having fun and hacking, I think we did really well. We didn’t win any prizes in the end but I had a really good experience, developing my coding skills, eating good food at a nice venue – although it was really cold – and with some good people, although it was so large a crowd I didn’t really get to know too many of them.
Blue Pigeons 