Spot-o-Matic

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Inspiration

One of our team members who is lucky enough to be in a relationship had trouble deciding what to do this Valentine with his partner. Since we've got his back, we decided to put our useless coding skills to good use and help him out a bit. The result: Spot-o-Matic.

What it does

Spot-o-Matic takes into account the preferences and interests of both the partners and suggests places for their next date.

How we built it

The UI is made in React. It interfaces with the preferences stored in a CockroachDB database via an Express backend. We also used the Google Maps embed API to provide the user with an interactive view of the places in consideration.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to use the Places API and parse its response into a custom map but we were running into issues using GCP to provision an API key. CockroachDB was also being a little (to be polite) buggy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first hackathon that we have actively taken part in. It is also our first exposure to CockroachDB and were quite surprised to see how many companies still rely on SQL based databases.

What we learned

After our failed attempt with GCP we tried web scraping using Scrapy and Selenium but were unable to get anything useful back from this telling us that Google is really uptight with its security. We learned how to use the Google Maps embed API. We are also not too familiar with the usage of PostgreSQL based databases, which we are now thanks to CockroachDB.

What's next for Spot-o-Matic

As of now, the preference list is pretty limited as its just a proof of concept as of now. With some more time and effort, this list can be made more exhaustive and dynamic to stay up to date. The algorithm that decides the spots given the preferences can be replaced by some form of a Deep Learning Model, potentially a Reinforcement Learning Model as it can learn from its own interaction with users.

Built With

Submitted to

Hackthrob

Created by

I worked with setting up the maps support for the final stage and implemented a thoughtful algorithm to find the suggested best place of meeting

Sidharth Giri
Worked on the backend of the project, integrated it with CockroachDB. Also tried hands on the GCP Places API but failed.

Ritvik Aryan Kalra
Worked on the UI/UX with React. Had to write a lot of custom CSS to fit the theme of Valentines, but it was fun.

Dhruv Kapur
Worked on web scraping to get information of nearby location since getting GCP Places API didn't work out. Didn't work though since google doesn't appreciate it while they are monetising their APIs.

Arihanth Srikar