Breww

Modern iOS application to catalogue and recommend beers!

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Inspiration

When you go back to a restaurant, bar, or brewery it can be hard to remember what drinks you had there before let alone if you enjoyed them or not. We wanted to make a service that will reduce the friction in recording this for you and allow you to enjoy your time with friends.

What it does

Breww uses the power of your mobile device with cloud computing and allows you to quickly and easily catalogue your beverages simply by providing a name or image of the bottle/can and we fill in all the other details such as style, category, ABV, ect. Breww is also capable of looking at the beverages you enjoy and recommend future beverages to you.

How we built it

The frontend is built in native swift and exclusively makes requests to our gcp backend. We chose to run a serverless backend rather then using an EC2. We use Firestore for our client database solution as it offers easy integration with our iOS application, we have our global beverage database indexed by Algolia for lightning fast queries, and we use Mircrosoft Azure's "Cognitive Service" solution to provide Computer Vision (OCR) and intelligent image search.

Challenges we ran into

  • Though alot of our complex logic like our recommendation system and computer vision is off the client device there was still alot to be done to polish the user experience. Our team is composed of only a single iOS developer and two backend/web developers so the client app was our bottleneck.

  • Our app like many is a hodgepodge of several key API's and for us most of them were new which was a large time setback for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • With only 3 members we were able to make a totally native experience leveraging computer vision, intelligent search, and content based recommendation in a coherent elegant flow.

  • We will be able to launch a testflight today and allow people to provide us feedback immediately.

  • We have been able to make an app that all of us are actually going to use going forward.

What we learned

  • We learned about computer vision api's strengths and limitations.

What's next for Breww

  • IPA? more like IPO!!!!
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