Yumm | Devpost

Inspiration

Research shows that when humans are presented with too many options, it often makes it harder for humans to make an easier and quicker decision. So we want to minimize the number of options presented to users when they are deciding where to dine.

What it does

Food Tinder! After launching the app, the program will ask users for their preferences (location, what kind of food, distance, price). Then, the program will display the 10 best-matched restaurants to users one at a time. Swiping right means that the user likes the restaurant and wants to visit. Swiping left means that the user displays the restaurants. By displaying only one restaurant at a time, we hope that it will help users to be able to decide on a restaurant quicker and spend more time enjoying the food and not struggling to find a place to eat.

How we built it

Yumm consists of two parts, backend and frontend UI. Our backend was made by incorporating the Yelp API into a Python program and then printing that on the terminal. Our frontend UI was made by using a combination of Kivy and Python. This Kivy window was the eventual final frontend, but we weren’t able to fully connect the frontend and backend.

Challenges we ran into

We were happy with the progress we made throughout the weekend, but we encountered a few struggles along the way. Our main struggle was trying to use Kivy. We all had experience with Python coming in, but none of us had ever seen or heard of Kivy before researching for this project. There were a lot of syntactical intricacies that we didn’t understand and it was hard to get used to making .kv files. While we couldn’t fully finish our kivy animation, we were okay with our ability to make an animation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all first-time hackers so we are all so proud of ourselves to be able to sign up for hack Harvard and be committed to this event. Even though we did not complete the project in the way we wanted to, we learned so much about python and just CS in general. Our CS skills definitely came out stronger than before and we are definitely going to join more hackathons in the future.

What we learned

We learned a lot through doing this Hackathon. We learned how much coding goes into making an app, even a simple one. We also learned how to use an API, and how to pull data from different companies and utilize these data in our own favor. We also learned how hard it is to make a frontend UI program, as there is a lot of formatting and small details that need to be considered. We also learned that with a lot of people focusing on one issue, things can get done much quicker. If we only had one person coding this, we would not nearly have gotten as far, but given that we had three of us, we were able to divide and conquer and accomplish a lot more than we thought possible.