for project story:
Inspiration
We used to rely on Bruin Dining for checking wait times and hours of operation, however, we encountered many bugs and redundant features that made using the app inconvenient at times. So, we decided to make an all in one app that displays the operating time of all essential UCLA facilities.
What it does
BruinOnTime is a more specific and general application available for UCLA students and others to check the hours of operation of very occupied places. Users of BruinOnTime can scroll through the app to check the hours of dining halls, fitness centers, and even libraries with just one click rather than redundantly searching through each facility's website.
How we built it
We built a scraper function that goes into each facility's website and looks for the operating hours of that day. Then another function processes the data of strings and transforms it into a readable format that our backend program can display as time. Lastly,
Challenges we ran into
Figuring out how to web scrape was the hardest part of the implementation for this project. Almost no prior knowledge of HTML, in addition, caused the process to be slow and mundane at some moments. In some cases, we weren't able to access some parts of the websites we wanted to grab data from leading to design pivoting, etc.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The newfound ability to website scrape is an accomplishment that we are very proud of. In general, our finished product is our greatest accomplishment and our very first main project that we created. Its handy and unique, and web scraping uniquely introduced a new way to code and access data from across the internet.
What we learned
What's next for BruinOnTime
We are always looking to more advanced UI, more information available, we are thinking of implementing a calender with campus wide events, including sport games, volunteer activities, and just about everything that can get students involved in the university.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.