Midhun P M — Case studyRyMeds
- Python
- Tkinter
- SQLite
The problem
Semester one, PYHACK hackathon, and our team — RYNEM — needed a problem worth solving. We picked something unglamorous: pharmacies track medicine stock and expiry dates in notebooks and memory. Expired stock is lost money at best and a safety risk at worst.
What I built
RyMeds is a pharmacy inventory system — a desktop app in Python with Tkinter and SQLite:
- Add, edit, and delete medicines with batch number, manufacturing date, expiry date, quantity, and price.
- Search by name or code.
- Expiry tracking — inventory sorts by expiry date automatically, and a "check expiry" view highlights what's expiring soon or already gone.
- Stock alerts so low inventory surfaces before it becomes an empty shelf.
We won the hackathon, and it later got named Best S1 Project.
Tech decisions
Python + Tkinter + SQLite, and honestly there wasn't a second candidate. We were first-semester students in a timed hackathon — the stack had to be something the whole team could ship in, with zero setup beyond Python itself. SQLite meant the database was a file we could carry on a pen drive.
What I learned
This was the first thing I built that someone could actually use, and it set the pattern for everything after: pick a real problem, ship the boring version first, make it work before making it pretty.
Tkinter taught me that UI code is mostly state management wearing a costume — a lesson that transferred intact to React years later. And building with a team under a deadline taught me that "who merges what, when" is a harder problem than any algorithm we wrote that weekend.