cafehopper

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Inspiration

As students, we’ve all struggled to find the perfect place to study. 🍵📚

We live in Melbourne, home to one of the best café cultures in the world. There’s no shortage of trendy spots, but finding a café that is study-friendly? It’s difficult when TikTok food reviews feel more like sponsored lies than the truth and Google Maps is run by boomers. 😤📱

This inspired us to create a space where students can help each other discover the best study spots, based on honest, study-focused reviews. Studying should be social, smart, and fun! 🥳💥

What it does

With cafehopper, students can:

📍 Explore cafés nearby through an interactive map
⭐ Rate and review cafés based on noise levels, ambience, power outlets, Wi-Fi quality, and drinks
👯‍♂️ Add friends and see where they’re studying in real time
🚨 Check into a café and notify friends you’re in study mode
💡 Receive café recommendations based on location and ratings through filters
👥 Join a friendly study community so everyone can lock in together

How we built it

We used React Native and Tailwind CSS for all frontend purposes, and SQLite and Firebase in the backend to keep track of cafés in the CBD, auth, profiles, reviews, friends, and the café users are currently at!

Challenges we ran into

Integrating Firebase was a struggle due to the sheer size of our dataset, which is why we switched over to an SQLite implementation of the cafés, and kept only users' information and reviews on Firebase, making it feasible to load over 30k cafés! Version control over different countries was also difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of getting all the information on cafés in Melbourne CBD, cleaning the dataset to include only operating cafés, and plotting them on the map.

Anyone can make a review website, but real-time updating of locations is a whole other challenge! Of course, the mini movie pitch was also a huge success!