Date Right

Inspiration

I (Camryn), felt inspired when my friend complained to me about her boyfriend's poor date planning. The situation was more challenging because they live in different cities, and the lack of transportation, as neither of them owns a car, made commuting a significant factor. Proximity became crucial in deciding on dates, hence making the date matter more due to the effort it took. I couldn't find an app that showed specific dating spots within a certain radius for two people and also provided the distance between those spots. Additionally, there was a need for an app to help plan dates with price filters. (considering they are both students.)

What it does

The app allows the user to input two locations, and show the top 5 best date spots in the radius between your partner and you, these are determined by reviews on Yelp, distance, and budget imputed by the user in the beginning. The app also shows the distance the date spot is from the user as well as their significant other in order to plan dates properly and efficiently.

How we built it

We started with building low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes on Figma and then coding out the basic front-end design. We then brainstormed the backend flow and got to work. While Bhuvnesh developed a Python script to filter the dataset and return the locations based on the parameters provided by the user, Cynthia and Lyn worked on the Flask backend and configured the Google Maps API. Meanwhile, Camryn continued to work on the front end and coded out the high-fidelity wireframes using HTML and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

The first hurdle we encountered was finding a suitable dataset to meet all our requirements. However, we fortunately found the Yelp business dataset which meets all our requirements. Next, we had to figure out how to work with the Google Maps API and create the backend in Flask, since none of us had worked with either. However, after a lot of googling, going through StackOverflow discussions, and a little bit of help from our friend, ChatGPT, we were able to get the project up and running. However, just hours before the submission deadline, we had some major issues with the Google Maps marker placement due to using addresses instead of coordinates and we had to make that switch at the last hour which caused some panic, however, we were able to make that change and get our code running again.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to create the app itself since we are all doing something we are unfamiliar with and pushing ourselves. Cynthia, Lyn, and Bhuv being part of the back-end team had to work with JS and Python. As well as Camryn having to code all the HTML, CSS, and bit of JS.
We are Proud of Cynthia, Lyn, and Bhuv for implementing the Google Maps API and Flask Backend.
Creating a cool logo 😎

What we learned

It was the first hackathon for all our team members so we definitely had a lot of new and exciting experiences. Most importantly, we learned how to work as a team under extreme time constraints. Apart from that, we obviously learned about a ton of new technologies such as Flask, Google Maps API, GeoCode, and Pandas. Furthermore, we got to interact with a lot of sponsors and experts during the course of the hackathon and got to learn about a lot of interesting opportunities from them.

We also brainstormed and sought advice from a lot of mentors and all of their inputs helped us polish our project further. In the end, we are thankful to the organizers of HackWestern for organizing this hackathon and providing us with this amazing learning experience.

What's Next for Date Right

Features we'd love to implement but could not due to ✨time constraints✨

Try experimenting with Data scraping and importing the data into Map-Box, (we wanted to do this at first, but since we are new to Data scraping and time constraints, we decided to use an API instead)
Improve the Wireframes drastically
Implement direct messaging
Features to share date spot with partner in direct chat or share features
Being able to bookmark Date spot
Add more than 3 date spots per radius
Add to Google Maps feature. -Being able to increase the radius.
Accuracy of distance between partners.