Surreal

Finding toilet paper during the pandemic was pretty hard. Ryan Poon and I thought it would be fun to scrape large retail sites like CVS, Walmart, etc... to check for toilet paper availability and price. We used Python CGI scripts with an Apache webserver to build the app. I manually implemented authentication with salted hashing and session IDs, and while it probably had security flaws, I found it quite fun. I didn't know about browser cookies at the time, so I sent data as hidden form values. When I built Surreal, I thought it was beautiful. Looking back, I've realized how much I've grown as a designer.