Give Me Eat!

Inspiration

Once upon a time, I was stuck in a car with hungry people, and we could not decide on a restaurant to visit. I realized that having some sort of app/website which would provide a limited number of options of places to eat would be a useful tool for indecisive people or groups who just want to eat.

What it does

We have built a website called 'Give Me Eat!.' Upon visiting the page, the user can enter a limited amount of information--area to search, price, and location--and then the website suggests 3 nearby random restaurants, with a picture, rating, address, and a Yelp link. It's pretty barebones, but serves its purpose in recommending a restaurant quickly.

How I built it

We developed this problem with Vue as our frontend, using Bulma to help style our html, and then used Flask as the backend of our project. We rented our domain (give-me-eat.com) from Domains.com, and rented a Unix server from AWS to run the project. We also set up a rudimentary API, and used Yelp's API to help us find restaurants and sort by rating.

Challenges I ran into

At the end of the project, we were unable to get our website to work on our server, and we had to resort to running a development build on one of our computers. Additionally, we had very little experience using Vue or Flask, so we had many issues attempting to gather/move/import data from API's and between webpages. Determining how to parse the JSON objects was also a difficulty and took up a fair chunk of development time.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that the project actually works as intended (at least on the development build...), and that we were able to use an API as intended and fetch/sort the required data in an efficient manner. Additionally, some more practical experience in Web Development is always useful, and I am proud that I was able to develop a website that was not completely ugly.

What I learned

We learned the basics of renting a server and setting up a Unix environment, as well as how to set up a basic Vue project with Flask as the backend. We also learned the benefits of being more prepared going into web development, as many tasks were far more involved and tedious than we initially expected.

What's next for Sunhacks-Project-2018

We plan to deploy the site on the domain we purchased, as well as add a history/user system (likely with some remote data storage) so that the system will recommend options chosen less times overall. Additionally, the website could use ways to sort by type of food, since Yelp provides the data through its API. Refactoring/other features could also be added, of course, and we think a mobile app could be a good possibility.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• mako
• python
• vue