## Inspiration

Our team first came up with this idea because we all struggled with managing our subscriptions to services like Spotify, Netflix, and Leetcode. And it turns out, we’re not the only ones. According to a 2021 Subscription Fatigue Report, the average US household is subscribed to nine different services, making it difficult to keep track of all their subscriptions. With the subscription service industry being so saturated and monopolized by large corporations, it can also be hard to find cheaper or sustainable subscriptions as alternates. This makes it difficult for smaller subscription-based businesses to compete against larger companies like Netflix, Spotify, or Amazon Prime.

## What It Does

SubTrack is the one-stop mobile app for managing all your subscriptions. We make it easy to subscribe, unsubscribe, and notify new charges/price changes.
SubTrack also serves as a subscription marketplace.

## How We Built It

We built our mobile app using Swift, our backend database using PostgreSQL, and served queries using FlaskAPIs. To improve our scalability, we used Azure Kubernetes Service in conjunction with Azure Autoscale to dynamically scale our backend computing power in response to changes in requests.

## Challenges We Ran Into

Challenges that we faced involved converting our designs into the actual mobile app. Our team’s collective iOS development experience is limited, so it took us a while to get used to SwiftUI syntax. After finishing our first "screen" in Swift, we got the hang of the syntax and were able to "hack" our way through with a ton of Googling.

## Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

"We demoed!"

We are proud of overcoming all the challenges that we faced as a team. Despite being limited by the amount of time we had to develop, we completed our project by distributing our workload and leveraging the various skills among the members of our team.

## What We Learned

A lot of SwiftUI and how to merge frontend designs with backend systems using different technologies such as Azure, Swift, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes.

## What's Next For SubTrack

Our next goal is to bring SubTrack to the real world by publishing it on the App Store. We want to make SubTrack into a B2B startup that can positively impact the subscription market. While SubTrack can help consumers manage their subscriptions, it can also empower small businesses by providing adequate market exposure. With enough users and data, SubTrack will be able to create multidimensional data models that personalize subscription recommendations for customers and predict customer churn rates for businesses. We can offer small businesses consulting services to help them analyze their customers and increase their user retention rates.
Our Team's First Hackathon - Treehacks 2024

## Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project was from the memories we recalled when sharing food and recipes with our families. As students, we wanted to create the prototype for an app that could help bring this same joyful experience to others, whether it be sharing a simple recipe to potentially meeting new friends.

## What it does

Our app, although currently limited in functionality, is intended to quickly share recipes while also connecting people through messaging capabilities. Users would be able to create a profile and share their recipes with friends and even strangers. An explore tab and search tab were drafted to help users find new cuisine they otherwise may have never tasted.

## How we built it

We designed the layout of our app in Figma and then implemented the front end and back end in xCode using Swift. The backend was primarily done with Firebase to allow easier account creation and for cloud storage. Through this, we created various structs and fields to allow user input to be registered and seen on other accounts as well. Through the use of Figma, we were able to prototype various cells that would be embedded through a table view for easy scrolling. These pages were created from scratch and with the help of stock-free icons taken from TheNounProject.

## Challenges we ran into

While we were able to create a front end and a back end, we were unable to successfully merge the two leaving us with an incomplete project. For our first hackathon, we were easily ambitious but eager to attempt this. It was our first time doing both the front end and back end with no experience from either teammate. We ended up spending a lot of time putting together the UI, which led to complications with learning SwiftUI. A lot of time was spent learning how to navigate Swift and also looking into integrating our backend. Unfortunately, we were unable to make a functioning app that lined up with our goals.

Alongside our development issues, we ran into problems with GitHub, where pulling new commits would erase our progress on xCode to an earlier version. We were unable to fix this issue and found it easier to start a new repository, which should have been unnecessary but our lack of experience and time led us down this route. We ended up linking the old repository so all commits can still be seen, yet, it was still a challenge learning how to commit and work through various branches.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of completing our first hackathons. We are a team composed entirely of newcomers who didn’t know what we were going to do for our project. We met Friday evening with absolutely no idea in mind, yet we were able to come up with an ambitious idea that was amazing to work on. In addition to this, none of us had any prior experience with Swift, but we managed to get some elements working regardless. Firebase was learned and navigated through as well, even if both ends never ended up meeting. The fact that we were able to accomplish this much in such a short amount of time while learning this new material was truly astonishing. We are proud of the progress we made and our ability to follow through on a project regardless of how ambitious the project was. In the end, we're glad we committed to the journey and exposed ourselves to many elements of app development.

## What we learned

We learned that preparation is key. Before coming here, we didn’t have an idea for our project making the first few hours we had dedicated to brainstorming what we were going to do. Additionally, if we knew we were going to make an iOS app, we would have probably looked at some sort of Swift tutorials in preparation for our project. We underestimated the complexity of turning our UI into a functional app and it brought us many complications. We did not think much of it as it was our first hackathon, but now that we got exposure to what it entails, we are ready for the next one and eager to compete.

## What's Next for Culinary Connections

We hope to fully flesh out this app eventually! We believe this has a lot of potential and have identified a possible user base. We think food is a truly special part of culture and the universal human experience and as such, we feel it is important to spread this magic. A lot of people find comfort in cooking and being able to meet like-minded people through food is truly something special. In just 36 hours, we managed to create a UI, a potential backend, and a skeleton of a frontend. Given more time, with our current passion, we can continue to learn Swift and turn this into a fully-fledged app that could be deployed! We can already think of potential updates such as adding the cooking lessons with a chatbot that remembers your cooking recipes and techniques. It would specialize in identifying mistakes that could occur when cooking and would work to hone a beginner's skills! We hope to continue building upon this as we hope to bring others through food while bringing ourselves new skills as well.
## Inspiration

At many public places, recycling is rarely a priority. Recyclables are disposed of incorrectly and thrown out like garbage. Even here at QHacks2017, we found lots of paper and cans in the [garbage](http://i.imgur.com/0CpEUtd.jpg).

## What it does

The Green Waste Bin is a waste bin that can sort the items that it is given. The current of the version of the bin can categorize the waste as garbage, plastics, or paper.

## How we built it

The physical parts of the waste bin are the Lego, 2 stepper motors, a raspberry pi, and a webcam. The software of the Green Waste Bin was entirely python. The web app was done in html and javascript.

## How it works

When garbage is placed on the bin, a picture of it is taken by the web cam. The picture is then sent to Indico and labeled based on a collection that we trained. The raspberry pi then controls the stepper motors to drop the garbage in the right spot. All of the images that were taken are stored in AWS buckets and displayed on a web app. On the web app, images can be relabeled and the Indico collection is retrained.

## Challenges we ran into

AWS was a new experience and any mistakes were made. There were some challenges with adjusting hardware to the optimal positions.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Able to implement machine learning and using the Indico api
Able to implement AWS

## What we learned

Indico - never done machine learning before
AWS

## What's next for Green Waste Bin

Bringing the project to a larger scale and handling more garbage at a time.