Inspiration
I study together with San often, and one issue we always have is deciding which late night snacks to eat. If you have gotten into this situation before, you'd probably know that "I don't really care, choose what you want to eat" is NOT helping me choose what we're eating.
So we made Lost Foodies! It's a website that shows real food pictures from the restaurants near you so you can decide not from "Kung Pao Chicken" or "Lamb Curry", but from this and this!
What it does
It shows you 30 pictures of randomly selected food pictures from the restaurants near you. Like tinder, swipe those that you like and when you feel like you've swiped enough, click to see which restaurants sell those scrumptious dishes!
How we built it
The backend calls the yelp api to get the business ids and scrapes food pictures near the user. It was made by Flask and Postgresql, and hosted on digital ocean. The website was made by standard HTML/CSS and Javascript, along with some bootstrap cheats. :D
Challenges we ran into
Mark: Searching through the HUGE number of restaurants and their pictures were definitely problems for the backend. I wanted to store every result I got to reduce the response time, but quickly found out that Heroku, which was where I initially deployed my server, only supported 30 seconds to be considered as a response timeout error. Because my goal was to cache the results and not scrape for photos for restaurants' dishes multiple times, Heroku's limitation was definitely hindering my strategy of achieving low romanticized time complexity.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Mark: First time I made a deployment without ANY ERRORS!!!!! This was Sunday 5 am, where I had very little sleep.
What we learned
Mark: Don't think that yelp api will give you everything. Their api documentation was wonderful, though.
What's next for Lost Foodies
Mark: I need to test my code really badly. I hate writing code without unit tests, but meh, hackathons. Also, I think I can organize my models and tables better. A lot better to make the response time faster.
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