Deciduous

Easily choose where to eat

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Inspiration

My roommate and his girlfriend go back and forth almost nightly on what they want to eat.

"Babe what do you wanna eat?"

"I dunno what do you wanna eat babe?"

"It's up to you babe."

"I could do anything."

"Yeah me too."

They can't decide, and it bugs me because they spend 30 minutes not deciding while I'm trying to program. So, I thought I'd build something that fixed that problem.

The name comes from the idea of trees: you traverse the decision tree (a pun with the tree classification deciduous), and decide - thus, Deciduous!

What it does

Deciduous is a web app that helps you decide where to eat, using simple questions. You answer a set of easy questions that leads you to a few choices on where to eat. The idea is to reduce the difficult decision of choosing somewhere to eat, to a few easier decisions. This is a far easier method for groups to use to decide on a place to eat.

How we built it

We're hosting a node.js app on OpenShift. The app has two parts:

  1. a client-side website, which Adam built, which encompasses a bunch of clever usage of Material Design Light (MDL), AJAX, other CSS tricks, and some excellent POST request formatting, and
  2. a server, which Nathan built, which handles requests from the client, sends requests to the Google Places API, and parses them in a very complicated way based on what the client told it.

The site works great on mobile and desktop, thanks to MDL and Adam's design. The server responds quickly, since it's hosted on the same computer on OpenShift (really just a Docker instance somewhere on the East Coast).

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble with formatting the page, and working with the more esoteric idiosyncrasies of HTTP headers. Additionally, we had to learn everything about a few things, including how JSON objects work in JavaScript. I'm still not entirely sure I get it but I can at least use them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we managed to get something like this working in only 12 hours. As a team of two, we went from no website, to a hosted website that does something fairly useful, in a pretty short time frame. That's cool to us.

What's next for Deciduous

We think that this could be a marketable service. Other competitors do something similar, but we have a differentiated take on it, and I think that we could really offer a service that changes lives for the better. Our potential revenue models are:

  • sell ad space on the website/app
  • allow businesses to pay us to increase the likelihood of their restaurant showing up
  • partnerships with businesses (we direct more traffic to them, they pay us a kickback)

In terms of features, we think that there are a lot of directions we could go. Adding directions to the final map, integrating the map into the site, grabbing more geocode data, adding images...the list goes on. The restaurant industry is a big space, and there's room to grow.

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