Food Hub

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App Picture

Inspiration

We're a bunch of college students who, during a hackathon, ran into a typical problem—where to eat without wasting precious hacking time? That's how FoodHub came about. It's our simple solution to quickly pick a spot everyone likes, combining the fun of swiping with the joy of eating out together.

What it does

FoodHub is a fun, easy-to-use app where friends form a group, swipe through restaurant options together, and quickly find a place to eat that everyone loves. It's social dining made simple.

How we built it

Frontend

We adopted React Native in conjunction with Expo as the foundational framework for our frontend development. We collaborated with the backend in creating a seamless user experience. We started with core features include the Swiping features and Creating Joinable Sessions. Later we improved upon our styling for the project with Pagination, Animations, and overall Qol changes.

Backend

Based on Node.js’s Koa framework, we build the application with MVC design pattern. All the data is stored on Mongodb Atlas, and the server is hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine with Continuous Deployment using Github Actions and Docker.

All the delicious photos are from Yelp’s academic dataset. We clean the data to filter only the restaurants with food pictures, and save all these pictures on Google Cloud Storage bucket, which serve publicly.

We also use the Google Maps API to compute distance between users and locations.

Challenges we ran into

How to automatically build and deploy the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Something we were very proud of was getting the Session to work properly since it required both the backend and frontend to work together. Another accomplishment we found was being able to use the google maps API to measure distance between the user and the restaurants. In addition we were very happy with the use of animations in our project which made the application feel a little more fun.

What we learned

We learned to not only collaborate with a group of people but how important it is to maintain an organized workflow when programming with peers. In addition we learned how we have so much more potential than we really imagined in terms of what we could achieve in the span of 24 hours. Lastly we learned a multitude of skills that we will probably use in the near future or even as a hobby.

What's next for Food Hub

Looking ahead, FoodHub aims to incorporate personalized recommendations, integrate with reservation systems for instant bookings, and foster a community where users can share their dining experiences. We're excited to spice up the app with features like in-group chat for lively discussions and the addition of cuisine filters to tailor the swiping experience to your palate's preferences. The table is set for FoodHub to become the go-to app for food lovers everywhere