AllerG

The Project

AllerG is an accessible and crowdsourced database of menu allergens for people with food allergies. It aims to reduce the chances that people have allergic reactions at restaurants by providing them with an easy-to-use reference. It is currently unfinished: the backend is only a quarter complete.

View this project on YouTube

Team Comments

I have a lethal food allergy to pecans, and although it's been years since I've been to the emergency room, I've had to perilously navigate menus and choose my meals carefully to do so. Since I've seen many of my friends do the same, I hope that I can help someone keep track of what's safe.

The database structure was easily the hardest part of the project to work out. Initially, I was using GORM, an ORM library for Go, but it had some rigid relation structures that I couldn't reasonably use for my project, so I switched to an unorthodox graph scheme to join my data.

I would reduce the minimum feature set of the backend so it can be completed quicker, and I'd learn how to develop in React faster. That way, it'd be completed in a reasonable time period.