Knead

In need a physical body relief? Knead is there for you. Instead of waiting for a massage apt, Knead will scrape YVR's local clinics for you to find an open slot. No need to wait for some Knead time.

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Inspiration

When I want a massage, I want it now. Not a week from now, not tomorrow, but nowww! But, finding that earliest apt was tough. I would have to go on google and find close by clinics, click on each one's website, look for availability, then validate the quality of the practitioners through reviews. This was all very tedious.

Thus, I made a site that solves this problem.

What it does

Knead allows you to find available apointments in your local vancouver area for your body work needs -- massage, chiro, accupucture, and physio.

How we built it

I build it using Devin. The code is written in python and js.

Challenges we ran into

Being careful to not DDOS the website. 90% of clinics in vancouver use Jane App in the backend which is their central apointment system. I do not want to make 100s of requests to Jane in a matter of a second, thus my algorithm for caching this data had to be well thought out. Fr example, everytime a new user comes, I do not wnat to scrape everything all over again. Rather, I should be using a cache which refreshes every X minutes.

Another challenge is that i can not scrape google reviews through web scraping due to google limitations. Thus i found a workaround to use a software called Outscraper to get those reviews. I also had to think carefully about minimizinng my cost when it comes to outscraper usage.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The app works! I am able to find open apointments in an area of vancouver in a time range :) Big win for me.

What we learned

  • a lot!!! Working with AI to make specs before implementation is key to make sure we are implementing what we actually want.

What's next for Knead

  • Finishing end to end testings for the app. Right now i have not added testing.
  • Also need to finish the review scraping feature. Once reviews are scraped, i need to then rank the practitioners.
  • Extend the app to greater vancouver. Right now, it only has downtown, kits, burnaby coverage. However, it is missing surrey and other greater vancouver areas.

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