Mobile Market and the Traveling Salesman

Once a month our church, Duke Memorial, does this cool ministry: Mobile Market. from the Inter-faith Food Shuttle.  They take surplus donations from local groceries and farms to distribute to families in need. About 100 of so families come to the church to pick up food. About another 100+ families get a delivery. These deliveries go to folks that are either sick or shut in to their homes.

My family now delivers to about 10 families. Sometimes the same ones, sometimes new ones. So each week I type in the addresses to google, rearrange the route to optimize it and yell at my family if they distract me while doing it.

Obviously this should be a mobile app and obviously it should be trivial to write. So obvious that the road is paved with my  prototypes using Python and Android Studio that just did not make the light of day.  So this Sunday another geek from my church is coming over to work on this with me. He has requested we use React Native .

Here is my spec for the application:

• Must work on Android phones (7.1.1) (Eventually iOS will probably be popular) 
• Should not put any PII on a Server. All addresses should be kept local. I see no reason to record names of the clients.  
• Flow :

• Bring in all your stops\clients 
• Did you deliver there before? Provide a list to multi select
• Do you want to auto import? Take a picture and use OCR  or OCR to get the address 
• All else fail? Type in the address 
• Let Google maps do its magic with waypoints=optimize:True 
• If this does not look right or someone prefers a different order, they can do that directly in google maps
• Optional : 
• While delivering, it might be nice to have easy access to the clients phone numbers based on where you are. (We have accidentally called the wrong home before) 
• It might be nice to have some history. ('Took 3+ minutes to get to door', 'Was in a GREAT mood today!!', 'Asked about some service', ...) Note: This should not be collected or shared. 
• Provide contact info to Patricia and Karalyn 

As I outline it, I have a renewed sense of shame that my previous attempts have not worked. If at first you don't succeed, ask for help! 

Cheers, 

Ginny 

As if David Byrnes knew me "Road to Nowhere" by Talking Heads