PubTab

https://vimeo.com/1059448810?share=copy#t=0

Inspiration:

When we first came to Ireland, some of us had never even had a pint of Guinness in our life. Nevertheless, 1.5 years later, we have come to love one of the main aspects of Irish life which is the pub culture. There is just something really special about having a pint and a laugh with the lads that we miss even back in our home countries. However, something that we have noticed is that as you drink more, you become more and more paranoid about your money and have noticed people getting in arguments with bartenders over their pub tabs. We thought that this often ruined people’s nights, so we wanted to build an application to simplify people’s pub tab experiences in pubs, by integrating automatic payments and orders to take the stress out of the paranoia that comes with being tipsy, and also save the bartenders the hassle of arguing with you.

What it does:

The PubTab app allows you to create a tab in a pub and pay for it without the need of moving away from your table, using the embedded payment option, which helps in avoiding crowds and a hustle next to a bar, and while being sure that you know exactly what you ordered and why you were charged your amount, making the finances secure both for you and the bartender. Usually, a customer may see and review different pubs’ menus to decide what they want to drink. To further streamline people’s pub experiences, we implemented a recommender AI that helps a user to explore and choose their next drink, focusing on recommending responsible, fun, and financially responsible choices.. Customers may also save their favourite drinks and snacks to be easier to find in the future.

How you built it:

To build it we used Django rest API for the back end with the embedded SQLite databases, deploying them on PythonAnywhere. The frontend display is managed by React native making the app flexible for both iOS and Android apps.

Challenges faced:

Having little experience with Django and mobile app development, the beginning was much harder than our team expected. Moreover, the long hours of coding, frustration and increasing fatigue, significantly decreased the productivity of the team at one point of the night.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

That we made it to the end and persevered! 🙂.

What we learned:

One of the main realisations that our team had was how determination and perseverance helps you go through difficulties, that teamwork and supporting each other have a tremendous impact on the workflow on the morale within the team. Also, every team member gained lots of experience using the above mentioned technologies and developed a valuable set of skills.

Future work:

In the future users would be able to create groups in order to order all the drinks and snacks at once. Instead of manually entering the table number, each table in every pub would have assigned a QR code. Users will be able to scan it, automatically assigning the table to a person and opening the tab.