Pay your friends and community members to buy your groceries! Payments through Venmo.

A group of us Phi Delts decided to develop this project at HackMIT. We identified this need: We often need to buy something – milk, pasta, ramen, beer – but we don’t want to make an extra trip to the store just for these things. We could ask our friends – but who’s going today? Will he be willing to do it for me?

We proposed GetMe – a collaborative shopping service. You post a “request” with what you want – a gallon of milk – and a “bounty” – how much you’ll pay for it - $6.00. The buyer keeps the difference between the “bounty” and purchase price as an incentive. You pay the buyer via Venmo.

We started to develop the project in Node.js, my first experience using it. Javascript is quite a bit more complicated than I realized. I need to read a comprehensive tutorial so I can properly work with Javascript as a full language, rather than just using jQuery all the time.

Interesting things:

• FireBase - a hosted database accessible through JS. Your app could have no “backend” as we traditionally imagine it. All the logic – presentation and business – would be in the JS that’s loaded with the webpage. The JS would then interact wit the database. That’s pretty cool – but it would be even more helpful if there was some kind of MVC framework for the frontend. Maybe it requires a new design pattern altogether.

• Venmo’s API – In v0, it’s gotten popular although they’ve hardly advertised it. They’ve just released a v1 update, meaning I’ll have to rework my wrapper.

We had a pretty good team – Eric is primarily a designer and frontend developer. I’m primarily a backend developer. Evan is a Javascript and Node.js expert. Aaron is an expert at databases.

We ended up not finishing the project, mostly because it took us almost 6 hours to decide on an idea, get everyone’s development environment setup, and find a division of work. I hope to finish the project, since we have so many good elements already there.