WhereToEat

Trying to decide where to eat out with friends? WhereToEat's got you covered. Simply tell us what you're in the mood for and we'll find options that suit all of you.

Comment 1

What Inspired Us

Our project was inspired by the difficulty of deciding on a restaurant as a large group and the tension it creates for the remainder of your friendship. We also wanted to help small businesses, especially with the difficulty they've had due to COVID, and we believe that our app is a great way to find local restaurants to support.

What WhereToEat does

WhereToEat uses an online room for users to access via code. The host can select a price range and then voting commences! Each user can choose what type of food they want and also any dietary restrictions they need met and WhereToEat will generate five nearby restaurants matching what the group is looking for. The users can then vote on which of these restaurants they want and head there while the night is still young.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and JS for the frontend and NodeJS for the backend: mainly to do the underlying algorithms choosing restaurants and sending votes. The Google Places API was used to access nearby restaurants' information based on the users' location and categorical preferences. The chosen restaurants are not only based on the most popular food type, but are weighted to the percentage of votes for each category. Even if only one person has a dietary restriction, all suggestions will accommodate it. Rating was also taken into account to rank the array of options.

Challenges we ran into

For every member of the team, this was our first hackathon, so we were unsure of what to expect. As such, what we wanted to do and what we could do did not always align. Lots of research and backtracking was done during the course of this event, especially when attempting to work with relevant APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we're very happy with our user interface and the fact that we got one API working!

What we learned

We all came in with varying experience, but everyone came out with new knowledge, from the existence of json and languages beyond Python and Java, to growing more comfortable with developer tools and developing ideas.

What's next for WhereToEat

In the future, we want to be able to accommodate the option for future outings. The user will be able to put in what time and date they would like to go out to eat, and our program will generate a list of restaurants with hours that match. Currently, WhereToEat only returns restaurants that are open at the time of the query. We also want to use the Google Maps API to further display the commute options to the restaurants, and have the user put in the type of transportation they will be able to access.

Share this project:

Updates