Situation:
For UGA Hacks 8 we wanted to create a website that would help users determine how crowded restaurants in Athens might be depending on the time. We had 36 hours to do this project, and ultimately created a final project that we are extremely proud of. The fact that this project was cultivated in such a short time truly demonstrates how strong our work ethic was as a team.
Task:
During UGA Hacks 8, we created a project according to this year’s theme of “travel”. We were given 36 hours, so my team opted to create a website that served our local community by catering to travelers. The ultimate goal of our project was to aid local businesses and increase local consumerism. We wanted to make it easier to choose restaurants in the Athens area, by enabling users to compare how busy recommended local restaurants might be at specific times. This centralization of data aids visitors by recommending restaurants along with their addresses, ratings, and how crowded they might be.
Action:
For this project we wanted to research the top restaurants in Athens frequented by students. So the majority of our restaurants are within 5 miles of the UGA campus. For initial data collection, we gathered the restaurant’s logos, addresses, and ratings in an Excel spreadsheet. Part of our team took this data and began to code a website that would fit our needs. This part of the project proved challenging due to lack of prior HTML and CSS experience, but through the project, we learned a lot about web development that we can employ in future projects. While the website was being designed, the other half of our team researched APIs to display how popular restaurants would be at given times. Lack of experience and the time limit prompted us to choose a new path, and we instead opted to use a JS package called AnyChart. This package allowed us to hardcode the restaurant crowd meter based on Google’s public data metrics. We did research into hosting our files on Docker, but due to time restraints, ultimately decided against it.
Result:
Our final product from this hackathon was a website designed to aid both travelers-through and residents-of Athens, by simplifying the process of choosing an uncrowded local restaurant. This hackathon was a good learning experience, as our team had little or no HTML, CSS, or Javascript development experience before the hackathon began. Our team performed very well under the time limit, and remained organized and on-topic throughout the weekend.
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