Eat What Sia? Bot

Eat what sia? One tap and you will know

Inspiration

The idea was inspired by an experience we had back when we were at Singapore Polytechnic. There was a roulette we could spin to decide what to eat.

What it does

It retrieves your current location or a manually inputted location and searches for nearby restaurants based on the search area and budget. It then prompts the user to add the returned restaurants to a roulette, where the user can spin the wheel to decide what to eat.

How we built it

The application is built with React and Vite, then deployed on ngrok and linked to a Telegram bot. This allows the app to launch as a Telegram mini app, so users do not need to install or search for it on the internet. It is easily accessible on Telegram by searching for "eatwhatsia."

Challenges we ran into

Ngrok has a limit on how many times it can server our application. OUR APP BROKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
For some reason, the api being called in the mobile phone is being rejected by an unknown reason. We spent 5 hours debugging it but could not figure it out.
We used an obscure library that has no proper documentation, making debugging even harder for us
We acidentally put the frontend and backend folder together in 1 repository, making deployment difficult as most deployment techniques require seperate repositories.
We also had to rush our university assignments alongside the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to make a working prototype of the telegram mini app as well as the tele bot.
Through this project, we had the opportunity to pivot away from making a typical website and instead built a website in the telegram itself.
We managed to build something that everyone was invested into ## What we learned
How to use ngrok for development
How to use telegram mini app api
How to use vercel for deployment