The problem Pota.to solves

Our project aims to decrease the work of finding ingredients for cooking homemade food. Instead of searching around the town, just ping what you need along with your location and email, and someone (usually a business or a person who has too much and needs to prevent it from rotting) will contact you.

Challenges we ran into

Google maps API was not free so we needed to find an alternate free map API and understand the documentation. We had to find a way to link map latitude and longitude with backend. The problem was solved with the help of AJAX.

Our main hurdle was the increase the speed of fetching the recipes. This is why we implemented ML and NLP on the searching algorithm and recommendation algorithm. The searching algorithm drastically reduces the search time.

Another challenge was to bind a compiled language over python due to its slow execution speed. This is what took a lot of time for us. Right now we decreased the data set for development purpose but later on we can increase execution speed by 40% by using rust embedded in python.