collabor-eats

so all friends can collabor-eat :)
Our implemented solution on a local server
Prototyped idea

Inspiration

After countless hours of arguing about food preferences just to pick dinner at a place that is poorly researched and expensive, we have finally had enough.

What it does

collaboreats is a chat room that makes group decisions easier, more intuitive, and most importantly, without argument. A user can create a chat room, where they can send their friends a generated code. Friends who join the room via the code will be linked into one common channel. In this channel, users will see a list of restaurants and will be able to vote on their preferences. Additionally, they can search for and add their own favourite restaurants. Users will be able see reviews, price, amongst other deciding factors.

How we built it

Users can create a chat room by choosing a nickname and a randomly generated code using our backend API implemented with Express. We store these in a MongoDB database, where user IDs are added once they join using the code. We ensure that users can not add multiple votes for the same choice by checking votes based on user IDs. For a user to add a dining option, our team found a way to leverage Yelp APIs to search and retrieve names, images, ratings, and a variety of other data. We then surface all of this data through our front end created using Vue.js.

Challenges we ran into

None of us were super experienced with JavaScript, so using a pure JS stack had its moments of difficulty. We picked an ambitious project where all of our members were very busy from beginning to end, but we ended up surpassing our own expectations!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super proud to have implemented most of our planned features despite only having roughly 20 hours for hacking. Designing our UI from scratch was also a point of pride, as well as our backend architecture that was very extensive.