Inspiration
When going out to the club, it's hard to tell if the club you're going to is going to be lively or completely empty. Time and time again, society has faced the struggle of making the trek to a new club or bar just to find that there's hardly anyone in it. We were inspired to help this issue, by developing Hangout Finder, a website that lets users see how busy places before they even leave home.
What it does
Hangout Finder finds nearby, busy nightclubs and bars, making it fast and easy to find our what bumping club to go to on a night out. It searches for nearby venues and shows how busy it is in real time, as well has its ratings, a brief description, and more. By analyzing anonymized cellphone location data, our site estimates foot traffic across the city, giving an accurate picture of which places are packed and which are quiet.
How we built it
On the backend, we used BestTime API to query nearby business, get the foot traffic of those businesses, and extract additional information about them. Using this, we constructed a list of locations based on the user's location. We also utilized Google-Places API to gather more information about each venue that could be useful to the user. On frontend, we opted for a simplistic, nightlife-inspired design so as to not distract from the focus of the site. We used HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a bit of Node.js to construct our frontend.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a number of challenges with interacting choosing the best APIs for our purpose, which would allow us to utilize all the information we wanted to display. Ultimately, we landed on BestTime and Google-Places. We also ran into issues with interacting with the APIs. All of our team was new to implementing APIs, so we had to spend a considerable amount of time struggling to familiarize ourselves with our tools. As we implemented the APIs into our project, we also ran into issues with understanding how to transfer data received by the APIs into other forms.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We achieved or main goal, which was to successfully developed a website that searched for nearby venues and displayed their busyness. Given our lack of experience, we were unsure of well we would succeed in implementing the necessary tools to get our website running, but we managed to overcome the learning curve we faced to deliver a working product we're proud of.
What we learned
We became familiar with how to use BestTime API and Google-Places API, which is a familiarity that could be transferred to future APIs we work with. We also gained a better understanding of how APIs function as a whole, which will make learning APIs we use hope to use in the future easier.
What's next for Hangout Finder
We aim to add advanced search and filtering options. Users will be able to search by venue type (bar, club, etc.), age restrictions, and more. We also made plans to implement an Events feature, which will search for nearby and upcoming events- such as concerts, festivals, etc.- similar to how we searched for nearby venues. We plan to use EventBright API, a tool which shares upcoming events in a given area, to accomplish this. The point of our website it to make going out easier, both now and in the future. While the Venues tab accomplishes the "now", the Events tab will make it easier for our users to plan to go out in the future as well.
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