Inspiration

Food Rex is a familiar design with a unique concept. We wanted to create something that people can use to pick food options when they can't decide what to eat.

What it does

Food Rex allows users to swipe on a random set of 10 food items which help populate their preferences. We use the preferences to then recommend food items to our users.

How we built it

Food Rex is a single-page web app built with a modern mobile-first React frontend, and a Node.js and GCP backend. We make use of Firebase to host our frontend, and App Engine and BigQuery for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was using Google BigQuery for the first time. We had to learn how to leverage BigQuery without it being too expensive to use. Other challenges we faced were merge conflicts and node_modules inside node_modules...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Centered Divs!
  • Learned about GCP
  • Implemented a Mobile-First Design
  • Learned more about the intricacies of recommendation engines

What we learned

We learned the importance of good design and planning, as well as how to think on our feet and to keep alternatives of all the tech we want to use. We also realized the importance of asking for help when faced with a problem that blocked our progress.

What's next for Food Rex

  • Make Food Rex work for more locations
  • Improve our recommendation engine
  • Partner with restaurants for monetization
  • Integrate with Uber Eats or Doordash APIs
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