ComCafe

ComCafe is a web application that connects students looking for experience with small businesses looking for help. Students and businesses can set up a profile and search for matches based on location, goals and skills. Feel free to set up an account and try it out! We suggest that you set your zip code as 61801, as we will be including an example business with that zip code so users will have at least one business recommended to them. Please be aware that there is occasionally a small glitch causing a 404 error after setting your profile, just refresh your browser and it'll work fine.

• Link to website: community-cafe.herokuapp.com
• Background image creator: https://unsplash.com/@georgie_cobbs

Motivation

Thanks to the COVID-19 crisis, students like us have been stuck at home without much to do. Our educations have been disrupted, and many of us have lost opportunities to learn new skills and gain experience through jobs, internships and research. At the same time, small businesses have been devastated by the consequences of the pandemic and are struggling to keep their doors open. For this hackathon, we saw a chance to help solve both of these issues at once. With our app, students can find ways to develop skills related to their major, interests and/or career, all while lifting up their community and helping small businesses in their time of need. We hope that this project will allow students to keep learning and growing through difficult times, and that we can make a positive impact on our communities at the same time.

Getting Started (Run this project locally)

Installing dependencies

After cloning this project onto your machine, navigate into the directory and run pip install -r requirements.txt in order to install all the dependencies required to run this project.

Database Setup

After ensuring that Postgres is running, set the database path in Models.py.

Running the server

Run: FLASK_APP=app.py flask run