Boba Pal #51

Inspiration

We were inspired by recipe generator apps that let you input ingredients and come up with recipes to make. Another source of inspiration came from the college lookup/matching application Naviance. It allows you to select desired traits concerning your college experience, like location, study abroad programs, etc, and then it generates a list of colleges that match your criteria.

What it does

It allows people to build a boba drink that they desire at the moment and then find drinks that match their criteria for sale near them organized by relevance.

How we built it

We first extracted data on boba drinks from boba shops in the area using the web scraper ParseHub. We collected the name of each drink along with its description, price, and the name of the tea shop on the food delivery website Grubhub. Using Grubhub was efficient as it gave a consistent template to extract data from. This data was then gathered into a JSON file to be organized into a large database that we could extract information from. Using java, we could parse the data to locate important keywords in the name and description. The percent of keywords that matched a drink was used to organize the drink by relevance.

Challenges we ran into

Two of our members had no coding experience, and the other two had limited experience. Due to this, we restored to compartmentalization of different tasks that were manageable for non-coding and coding members. Another challenge we faced was how exactly to scrape the data we needed, and which websites to scrape. At first, we used Doordash due to its extensive list of boba places. However, we soon ran into the issue of our web scraper being incompatible with the site due to how Doordash is designed. As a solution, we moved to GrubHub, a similar site that is more scraper-friendly. This was the right decision, after working out the kinks of Parsehub, we were easily able to obtain data from each store that was on GrubHub.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As our first hackathon, we are proud that we managed to finish with a completed and working project. We're also very proud of our ability to divide tasks, giving each team member a role that matched their skills.

What we learned

Our first hackathon was a challenging but great learning experience. We learned how to effectively communicate with each other to overcome daunting challenges and work as a team. For the two members with previous coding experience, this project greatly expanded our technical knowledge of Java.

What's next for BobaMatch

We desire to incorporate the back-end code into a fully functioning mobile application for IOS and Android devices. We also would like to refine the process and take into account combination drinks of different flavors. Another key aspect we are going to focus on is the application being user-friendly and pleasing to the eye.

Built With

• java
• parsehub