How I built my first fully functional app in 2 days

DiaGuide: Diabetes Risk Prediction App

👋Introduction

    Hi there! Last week, I built my first fully functional website, implementing AI to predict diabetes risk using historical data. This was my first time publishing a real, working website- and I am honestly proud of the result. And I built all this during 48-hour hackathon, working solo. I used Streamlit for the UI, scikit-learn for the AI training, and a model. Here is how:

💡The Idea

    When the project topic was first released, I was slightly surprised to see healthcare 💓 — most of the hackathons I had joined previously allowed more open-ended, general tech solutions. But then I started thinking 🤔, and this pushed me to research more deeply.
    Since I was good at data analysis and developing ML models, I decided to focus on those areas. I spent all of Friday and Saturday morning brainstorming ideas. I actually came up with a couple🧠:

• 💊 Medication Tracker App
•  An app to keep track of daily medication while allowing users to note how effective each medication is.
• ✅ Easy to implement
• ❌ The idea wasn't original enough
• ❌ I wasn’t sure how to keep track of the data on a web server
• ❌ I didn’t have enough time to learn and build a mobile app

• ❓Symptom-Based Doctor Recommendation
• A questionnaire to determine whether the person needs to go to the doctor.
• ✅ Useful in real life
• ❌ Too broad
• ❌ Hard to implement with all the parameters and questions
• ❌ Hard to find a reliable database to use

    Because of the reasons I mentioned above, I decided to pivot. But I still liked the idea of using a questionnaire to determine something important. So I shifted gears to something more specific — a disease or mental health condition. I was very indecisive at first, but then I found a very useful diabetes dataset, and the parameters made sense to me. That’s when I committed to building DiaGuide.

⚙️ Tools & Stack

🀄Language(s): Python 

💻Frontend

• 🔨Tools & Libraries: Streamlit
• ❓Why I chose it: I needed a simple library that I could use to create layout and I needed it fast🏃‍♂️💨. As someone who doesn't have much experience in forent-end design streamlit helped me a lot with being beginner-friendly and having a good documentation📖 and tutorials. It was the perfect tool to create data-heavy app that requires minimal UI design.
• 🛠️How I used it: It was basically the cornerstone of my UI. Everything - from layout to interactivity - was built using🐍Python. No HTML, no CSS, just clean Python code.

🤖Machine Learning

• 🔨Tools & Libraries: scikit-learn
• 🔎Model Type(s): Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting
• 🧹Data Cleaning Libraries: Pandas, Numpy
• 💪Performance/Evaluation: I created 3 different models and evaluated each one of them by getting their ROC curve - this evaluatoin checks how successfull the model is using the test sample when 1 = exact, 0.5=same as randomly chosing:
• Logistic Regression: 0.81, very fast ⚡
• Gradient Boosting: 0.82, okay speed⌛
• Random Forest: 0.77, slows down the code significatly 🐢and slower server response
• 🏆Result: Logistic Regression, it didn't have much accuracy difference with gradient boosting but was significantly faster.

📊 Dataset

• 🌐 Source: Kaggle / UCI Machine Learning Repository
• 🔗 Link: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/alexteboul/diabetes-health-indicators-dataset/data
• 🔢 Features Used: BMI, Age, Blood Pressure, etc.
• 🤔 Why this dataset: ✅ Clean, 🏷️ labeled, 🧠 interpretable
• 📝Additional Notes: I didn't use two of the columns in the database - which were education level and income - because I thought they were more personal. Also I evaluated with and without them and they only increase the accuracy by 1% which is not significant.

🌐 Hosting & Deployment

• 🚀 Where I deployed: Streamlit Cloud
• 🧑‍💻 Github Repository: SuleymanSade/DiaGuide
• 🌐 Streamlit App: DiaGuide App
• 🛠️ How I did it: I put all the libraries I used into requirements.txt ➡️ Configured git lfs to fit my models (since some of them were bigger than 100MB) ➡️ Created a GitHub repo & pushed the code ➡️ Set up Streamlit Cloud and it was ready to go
• ❓Why I used Streamlit Cloud: It was free-to-use and really simple to set up. It also connected to the repository, so if I make a change in the future, the website is going to update too.