Inspiration
From our experience, choosing what to eat when visiting a new restaurant was a challenge. It sounds like a very first world problem, which it is, but it might happen to all of us.
What it does
A web app that provides users with what is hot and trending at a venue. Say, you decided to visit a Japanese restaurant but are having trouble figuring out what to eat, and want to find out what was the thing that was trending at that location. Our app just requires you to enter the venue name and it will generate suggestions for what is popular, and also provide an overall aggregated review of a venue.
How we built it
We built our web app mainly with Javascript and the React library. We did not have a back end and integrated all the API calls into our React front end. We used API calls to Foursquare, Zomato, Yelp and Google Places to retrieve data and calculated the aggregate data. The UI was styled with Material UI library.
Challenges we ran into
Prior to this we had nearly zero knowledge on front-end development. We had not worked on projects that extensively used React or Javascript. The choice of React, although was good, provided us a lot of challenges, as a barely known library for us, we struggled to learn its quirks and features. We also had to utilise APIs which we weren't familiar with like Foursquare, Zomato and Google Places. Being our first hackathon event, we were not really prepared with the amount of mental effort that we were required to put in.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We managed to produce something tangible at our first hackathon event which to be honest, in our books, is a win for ourselves already. We managed to take something we didn't know anything about and cram in knowledge that would typically require a few weeks of self learning to achieve, which was satisfying.
What we learned
We learned a lot about front-end development and user interface design. We learned a lot about communicating with your teammates and co-operative development. We also learned that mentors are super nice people and are really helpful! Cheers to all the people who helped us out with advice for our tech stack and coding practices!
What's next for H.eat
We are definitely going to be continuing work on this. Our first thing would probably be introducing Redux state management which is another part of React that we have yet to learn about. The next thing would be to decouple our API calls from the front end and develop a back end, probably in NodeJS.
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