The problem AlmQuest solves

Restaurants worldwide are throwing away 22 billion pounds of food a year and solely in India every year almost 67 million tonnes of food gets wasted, which amounts to approximately 1 kg of food per day for an undernourished person in the country. So we aim at doing away with this enormous crack in the terrain of productivity of our society.
The way we approached the solution is by taking into consideration the aforesaid statistics. We mapped the data of wastage against “shortage”. Our idea is to provide a platform for the people with excess of food (i.e. the ones with potentially wastable food) and for individuals or organizations with the intention and capability of distributing food in under-privileged, undernourished regions which are most in indeed of this kind of aid and support.
People can sign up on our webapp as either 'Donors' or 'Distributors'. Donors get to donate the excess food they have. Distributors are the ones who collect this food and distribute it to underpriviledged people in areas under poverty.

Challenges we ran into

The initial problems we had were with the environment setups that we had to establish to integrate our three different components. Following these issues, we had trouble integrating the Python service with our Node server which we fixed ultimately by hosting our python service as a different service and building APIs around it. We also faced some issues with push notifications that the pairing service uses to notify users if their package has been paired or not - namely repetitive notification issues and issues with handling 'read' notification states.

Being students, we had to use free hosting services to deploy our website and servers due to which we had to face a set of hurdles. Most free hosting services constantly go to standby mode whenever our servers are inactive for more than 15 mins or so, due to which when we open our app after some time, it remains unresponsive for quite some time.
To overcome this hurdle, we used a website monitoring service UptimeRobot which constantly pings our servers and website on a regular time interval which prevents our servers from becoming inactive.