BlindDate

Need new book, streaming, or music recommendation? We won't let you judge them by there cover, but we'll set you up on a blind date with a new book, movie, or album!

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Inspiration

We love the idea of a blind date with a book, so we wanted to crowdsource it out as an online platform. Everyone eventually gets overwhelmed or bored of the recommendations provided by streaming services or book marketplaces, so we wanted to provide a fresh, new way to get recommendations. We hope to get you interested in a book or movie that you haven't considered watching, or perhaps even never heard of.

What it does

The home page provides "blind" recommendations to users, based on the category (book, movie, tv show, or album) and genre they select. These recommendations intentionally don't tell you much about the book, but instead provide simple keywords to generate interest. The user can then choose to "unwrap" the book or other medium of choice in the application if they are interested. At the same time, users can submit books they have enjoyed, by providing a title, short description, and just a couple keywords, which is when our application gathers other data about the book through external API's and stores it in our database to recommend to other users.

How we built it

The site is powered by a Django backend and React framework frontend. The Django application handles all of the external API calls for metadata on the user-submitted books, movies, tv shows, and albums. It also contains an API interface to allow for communication between the React frontend application and the database.

Challenges we ran into

While some of us had experience in Django and React.js, none of us had ever combined the two to create a more powerful application. We ran into many issues concerning how to merge the two frameworks for a better experience, but after much trial and error, we were able to quite smoothly integrate React.js in a way that made the project operate even better than just the sum of its components. We also ran into issues concerning how to call the external API's from the Django backend, as it was not something any of us were experienced in. However, we eventually figured out how to make those asynchronous API calls that don't detract from the user experience of the site.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned

Being able to integrate the Django and React.js frameworks was a very exciting accomplishment when we finally succeeded. We all ended up learning a lot about the framework that was unfamiliar to us, and more about our familiar frameworks as well. Also, in the beginning of the project, implementing functionality for movies, tv shows, and albums was only a stretch goal. However, we were proud at the end of the 24 hours that we were able to integrate all 4 mediums into our project, utilizing multiple unique API's to do so.

What's next for BlindDate

We hope to further integrate our application into third-party sites such as Google Books, Amazon, or Spotify, so that we can provide an end-to-end user experience. API's provided by these sites would allow us to link to recommendations we provide, or even automatically add recommendations to a bookshelf or playlist. Also, our method of gathering information about the books and other mediums involves only searches by title due to the limitations of the API's used. In the future, we hope to find other API's that might provide more search query opportunity to get more accurate and relevant information about the user-submitted recommendations.

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