Inspiration
So this idea came to me when I was driving from Grand Rapids back to my home to Farmington Hills, near Detroit. I made this trip frequently to visit friends and family during the various breaks during the year. To break the monotonous drive, I would always try a new Restaurant on the route. The problem was, every time I pulled up google maps and asked it to find restaurants near me, I would get a good number of results like Tim Horton's, McDonald's, Cracker Barrel, and so many other national chains. While the food at these restaurants is often quite good, it was almost never new. I remember being so frustrated saying "I wish I could filter out these results!" I remember looking for an app online that would do such a task, and while some like Good Eats did a wonderful job, they were often curated and not dynamic lists of restaurants. That is what led me to develop an app to find restaurants that are local and non-chains. The app can support local businesses, while often supplying people with new experiences. It is also worth noting that people will claim that local restaurants often provide healthier food. It is for these reasons, that I pitched this idea to my team at CalvinHacks. - Aaron Bager
What it does
The app uses a static list of the 250 most popular chains, and by default will filter out any restaurants belonging to those chains. \
We also included the basic filter functions as well as sorting options that google maps provides, as well as a sort function that is based on the estimated "popularity" time of the restaurant. A person can sort by popularity at their current time to determine if they are more or less likely to be waiting before being seated and/or served. It can be sorted either way as some people may think that a restaurant that is busy must mean that it is successful and/or quality.
How I built it
Challenges I ran into
Definitely connecting the front end to the back end was something that was the most time consuming. It was also difficult to contain the scope of the project, as everyone on the team had wonderful suggestions and ideas that we just didn't have time to implement. I will discuss future plans of this app in the What's Next for Dine Find section.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
As small as it sounds, just getting the initial idea off the ground running. I would occasionally overhear a team hours into the hackathon lamenting that their original idea didn't pan out or that they still didn't have a working prototype, further expressing that they were unsure if they would have something to show the judges in time. The fact that our first idea had gone so well, especially considering that our team is made up of three new hackers (two of us had only done one hackathon, while this was one of our member's first times at a hackathon). I believe that our success was due to us keeping a realistic goal with a desire to push features that were essential and achievable within our twenty four hours, while remembering and temporarily setting aside other features that were unessential and more difficult. Those said features, were worth remembering as they were great ideas of what could be implemented in the future.
What I learned
Each individual team member learned something different so it seemed only natural each would give their own response to this section
My experience previously was only in the back end of software. Because of the expertise of my team in front end, and in back end as well, I was able to learn greatly about how to connect the front end and the back end and how the front end is developed and designed. While this is not my first hackathon, I also was able to observe on my own team how development work is divided up, and yet harmonized into a working product. I also learned of wonderful frameworks and products that can assist me in the future such as Google Firebase, while learning about tools that I have yearned to see more of such as PHP and react. This project once again reminded me the importance of setting realistic goals, but not to shy away from a little ambition. I helped with my expertise in Linux which was useful in the Google Cloud Terminal, and hoped I could pass even a little bit of that to my teammates:
Aaron
Nick
Caroline
Hemkesh
What's next for Dine Find
The app is still far from finished which is to be expected when coding in a hackathon.
One of the big features we wanted to include was a 'certified reviewer' system, where people visiting a restaurant could take a picture of their receipt, which through machine learning our app would then mark any review that the user makes at an establishment marked as "Verified", giving more confidence and credibility to people's reviews.
Next, as the app is focused on finding quality dining experiences, that means that the restaurants that are suggested to the user would be more or less tailored to each individual user, as taste is subjective. The app would use machine learning to move restaurants that are more in line with the user's preferences towards the top when they search in the area, and possibly have a separate tab that gives personalized recommendations.
The original vision of the app was to be able to have a dynamic list of chain restaurants, which was unfortunately too great of a task for the 24 hours we had. Making a dynamic list that is self-updated would be the next big step of the app.
We also wanted to include a list of restaurants the end user could mark off, and then use in a filter to show only places that they have not been to yet.
There were smaller features such as sorting by age, which was not possible as it was not provided by google places api. The focus of that feature was that people could find newly opened restaurants that would
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