Where 2 Meat

Before adding locations
Adding locations
Final result

Our Vision

We created this to tackle the problem of finding a common, healthy place to meet that works for everyone

Inspiration

Ever felt overwhelmed where you could meet your friends or colleagues for dinner because of the unlimited places you could go to? Ever had that one friend who has to travel so far, they might as well move to another country? Ever been THAT friend? Well fret not, because we have got Where2Meat just for you.

These struggles inspired us to develop Where2Meat. Where2Meat is a website that allows you and your friends to find a common spot to meet to grab a meal at a restaurant or a coffee at a café that is central to all of you. Whilst there seem to be numerous ways to organise when to meet friends, there isn't much to assist with finding an equally accessible location for where to meet. Health rating of each one of these places is provided as we want to promote healthy eating for you and your mates. What’s more fun than being healthy together 😉?

What it does

Where 2 Meat is a convenient site that not only locates the best central meeting point for you and all your friends, but also offers a range of restaurants and café options in the vicinity of the central point. Simply enter your location and your friends’, and lo and behold, the common point is shown on the map with all the recommended wonderful restaurants and cafes that you can visit to catch up with your old buds. The estimated price range, address, and health ratings are also presented so that the user can make a decision that everyone is happy with. Moreover, a health rating for each one of the options is presented for those who want to watch what they eat

How we built it

Before actually getting straight into coding, we used Figma to come up with a design that takes into account UI/UX principles to ensure a seamless user experience. NodeJS was primarily used in the backend which sought to integrate Google maps API and Places API to present all the necessary information to the user. For the Frontend, we mainly used HTML and CSS as all our team members were familiar with these languages.

Challenges we ran into

There were a couple of challenges that we faced when working on this project. For example, all of us in the team were not very familiar with backend development and working with APIs, so that was something that we had to deal with in a short frame of time. The CORS error was another error that we all encountered for the first time. It took us a while to understand the relationship between client side and server side and to find a way to resolve such issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of being able to overcome our challenges, particularly coming to understand and utilize APIs we were all new to, and our ability to learn new concepts quickly, such as learning how to handle a lot of our backend. We were also able to remain efficient and organised, sticking to schedules, and planning and maintaining realistic timeframes. Alongside this was our adaptability to arising problems and errors, where we were able to overcome these through collaboration, ensuring they didn’t cause major hold ups in development.

What we learned

Not only did we learn a lot from experimenting different things during the hackathon, but we also learnt a lot from one another. For almost all of us in the team, this was our first time participating in a hackathon and we weren’t sure what exactly we were to expect. Backend development was a new concept to most of us and this project allowed us to not only become familiar with it but also learn how to integrate APIs and present all the information in an efficient manner. All in all, we all brought something to the table and worked together, supplementing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and just had fun doing so.

What's next for Where 2 Meat

Moving ahead we plan to introduce a mobile application and extend certain functionality. One such functionality that we would like to introduce would be to allow users to move the common point marker to another location if they want to. Moving the map marker to another spot would still show the user cafés and restaurants at that location. We also intend to allow different users to enter their own location using a link so that one user does not have to enter all the locations thus allowing further ease of using Where2Meat.