“No more long lines” Introducing Chill

Chill is an app that allows people to virtually stand in line for stores. Instead of having to wait in long lines outside, users can wait inside their car and wait for their turn to enter the store.Users will have a browse section so while they wait they can browse through the store's site and determine what they want to buy. This will hopefully lead to less time in the store as well if users know exactly what they want. For our MVP, we’ve populated our database with pre-created stores and users will have the option to stand in line at that store. The join queue button will then tell you your position in line.

Why?

The purpose of this project had stemmed from past pandemic restrictions where people were only allowed in stores in increments. In a time where people were desperate to be outside, more and more people were taking trips to the store. This was an issue because the lines for these stores were outrageous and not very safe with everyone being in the same space. We decided to create a way for people to still enjoy shopping but in a way that coincided more with the new restrictions that were put in place.

Challenges

The biggest challenge for both of us was putting into practice a language we had just learned. Our tech stack consisted of nodejs, mongoose, bootstrap, and handlebars and most of these we had just learned within the past couple of months.

Challenges for Merissa:

The biggest challenge for me was just learning and understanding the new syntax for using handlebars. I was intimidated at first and caused a delay in the implementation of the front end.

Challenges for Chris:

Biggest challenges were around using models. Learning mongoose was a struggle and it took me a while to be able to figure out how to use data from my models throughout different areas of my file structure. It seemed difficult at first, but I gained a lot from just diligently scraping through the web and asking for help on various problems.

What did we do about these challenges?

What Merissa did:

I created pair programming sessions with Chris and he really helped explain what was happening and how to format the syntax. We also practiced writing our own tickets so that when we meet up to discuss blockers we use that.

What Chris did: Chris has gone to office hours with the instructor to work out the bugs he’s had with the routes. He’s shown up to all of our pair programming sessions as well.

What’s Next?

We think this could be a cool portfolio project so we want to implement more features for admin users. These include:

Being able to create a list of things to buy while browsing the stores site Create routes so that when a user leaves a store, they can press a button that their heading to the next store on their route and then the app will automatically put them in line once they are in the proximity of the store. Have an estimated wait time.