#UKvsCovidHack — WhatsIn

Evie
#UKvsCOVIDHack
Published in
3 min readApr 12, 2020

Hi everyone, we’re Claire, Evie, Sarah, Dagmara and Bella from Team WhatsIn. Welcome to our #UKvsCovidHack project! Introducing the team:

Claire is an interpreter based in Geneva who likes to make Arabic and Persian calligraphy in her free time; Evie is a full stack .Net developer and cheese lovin’ funky drummer from Stroud; Sarah is a full stack .Net developer and legend of Codebar Bristol who has blue hair. Dagmara is a full stack PHP and React developer based in London, who ingeniously came up with the initial idea for this project. Last but not least we have Bella, a book editor-turned MERN stack developer from Winchester who speaks Russian!

Over the course of Women Driven Development (WDD)’s UKvsCovid19 hackathon, we have crystallised our idea for a web application that allows individuals to check the stock levels of a given item in various shops at a given location.

We believe this will help solve several problems that have resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic. Imagine a scenario in which, say, Asda have a healthy stock level of Double Gloucester cheese, but the cheese-eating public are unaware of this. They do know, however, that Aldi have some Double Gloucester cheese, so this unfortunately ends up creating long queues outside Aldi. This situation not only brings about a very risky congregation of people in one place, but also potentially leads the way to food waste at Asda since few people know how much cheese they have. WatsIn solves these problems by providing a means for people to tell others how many packets of cheese are in Asda, Aldi, Tesco and other locations; and by providing a means for people to ask “How many packets of cheese are there in the shops where I live?”.

With regards to tools and technologies, we have employed a slick React single page application for the front end user interface, designed by Claire and Dagmara and built by Bella and Dagmara. On the server side, Sarah and Evie have made a RESTful API in C#.Net Core which connects to a SQL Server database and is hosted on Winserve. Additionally, we’ve ensured that the quality of our code is robust by testing the C# service logic with NUnit, and testing the React UI components with Jest.

Throughout the course of the project, we have worked in a collaborative and Agile way, having frequent stand ups and using a Trello board to chunk down and visualise the work to be done. One of the best things about our team is that no member ever hesitates to ask for help, so we all know we have each others’ backs.

WhatsIn works by a user clicking a button on the React front end, which then executes a fetch function in JavaScript. The fetch makes an asynchronous call to our RESTful service to ask it for some data, and the service responds with that data, which is then rendered on the React app!

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