Oxfam app

  While in high school, I was member of the "JM Oxfam" store. We would sell Oxfam products during lunch time as well as propose different educational activities throughout the year. I liked it but one thing that bothered me was that at the end of each sale session, we had to count everything we sold by hand. From this we could deduce the money we made, again by adding the prices of each product. I found the process long, tiring, and we would miss the beginning of courses that followed lunch time as it was very long. After some time, I searched for a way to go around this problem.Pretty soon, I thought about an phone app. So I learned Java and Android development on my own and started coding an app to get rid of this last accounting operation. Several months later, my first prototype was ready and I could present it to the teachers. We bought a phone and began to use it. To make it as easy as possible to use I made two tutorials, one for teachers and one for students.   It simplified lots of the process but one problem remained: I did not take the time to learn database programming, so all products were hardcoded in the app. It was not too much of a problem as the offer was not changing significantly, so it was rare that I had to add products. But it blocked one great potential of the app: manage supplies.   This is why later on, while at university, I developed a new version with the help of Basil Fabris that embedded a database. Basil was attending studies in machine learning and databases, so he was great at developping what we needed. On my end, I designed a new UI that would fit the new features. This was more challenging than the previous one as everything was now dynamic, with changing product lists etc. We could sell this version to the Oxfam regional center (with the help of our former teacher) so all Wallonia schools could benefit of the service. We agreed that for the paid price, we would not continue to maintain the app by ourselves, as we were both busy with our courses and studies. We simply added a final update some years later to add the capability of exporting the sales data into an Excel format instead of simple PDFs.   Sadly, the app is not compatible with Android 9.0 and upper. As Basil and I have moved on to other challenges, we did not take the time to investigate the problem any further.