Inspiration
Our team comes from El Dorado Hills, a town 30 minutes east of Sacramento and 2 hours and a half from Informatica. We drive down to compete in hackathons in the Bay Area often, as there aren't so many in our area, and we often find ourselves in a world of cuisine foreign to us and our tastes. Foodle is an Android App dedicated to our team member Vasanth, someone who can never decide where to eat because he never quite knows if the taste is authentic or worth it.
What it does
Foodle sets out to tackle these problems, by giving users the power to find out what restaurants local residents believe best represent the local culture, are worth the money, or just simply places anyone must visit. Alternatively, users can help review places they usually visit to best explain to strangers and tourist why your local Ramen place is simply the best.
How we built it
We built Foodle using Android Studio, and collaboration through using Git to handle version control and push to BitBucket. We used many Google Apis, like Maps, Places, and Sign In to manage our users and the places they like to eat at. All of the information was moved through the cloud using Firebase to allow anyone to access their favorite restaurants anywhere.
Challenges we ran into
Because our other team member, Dustin, drove us all the way down to San Mateo and is responsible for driving us back, he took a backseat in development to sleep so that he could drive us home safely.
Our greatest challenge, however, was flushing out the design and architecture of the application, as our team had numerous arguments over what our final project actually should be. Many of us were building our own individual parts of the application during the first night, but as the sun came back up we finally came together to put it all together, with much greater efficiency.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Vasanth is especially proud of staying up for the entire twenty four hours, but I am proud of how all of use have , through SMHacks, mastered any of the Google APIs and are just beginning to unlock their potential. Perhaps in future projects, this understanding will help us make even cooler things with half of the hassle of async tasks and API calls.
What we learned
As I described earlier, our challenges and successes taught all of us a lot about amazing software like the Google APIs, and the importance of good planning over blind hacking. Also, it is important to stay hydrated before sleeping, or you end up waking up with a coarse throat. Asking for help from mentors also helped us a lot, and being able to break out of our comfort zone to share ideas with strangers really helped both our project and our knowledge of what we were making.
What's next for Foodle
At the end of Smhacks, we even began to integrate stops other than food, but that feature remained unfinished in the final version. Maybe later we will finish that feature and expand local reviews to things other than food. We most likely will post the project online on Github and share it with our friends back home to see if anyone else is interested in helping us work on it to improve it. Maybe the app will catch on in our area and become big.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KwkaybjEI8n0Y_W4vEV2BVqsylm_4wMex5sNSPw7GZM/edit?usp=sharing
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