Rapid Raving Restaurant Roulette

How often have you found yourself in this position? Everyone wants to eat out, but nobody knows where to eat? Now, you can use R^4 to eliminate the headache of choosing where to eat.

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Inspiration

We realized how often we've been faced with the issue. Choosing where to eat would end up taking forever, and we had no good system to narrow down choices.

What it does

This application presents you with dining options around you and will give you the chance to pass on or blacklist options you don't like. It allows you to have a more simplified view that removes the overwhelming amount of data often encountered when searching for restaurants.

How we built it

We built this primarily in React Native so it could run natively on iOS and Android. We used JavaScript scripts to make API calls and handle data manipulation in order to present the user with the most important information.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled significantly with deciding upon a level of abstraction – too few details and the user doesn't know enough to decide where to eat, but too many and the user is overwhelmed again. We also struggled to find and implement appropriate APIs to get the data we needed. We ran into significant challenges with identifying the appropriate libraries to use that would allow us the platform independence we need.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting react-native to cooperate without breaking our computers (too much).

What we learned

We learned a lot about working with React Native and expo to run native apps on a variety of platforms. We also learned how to collaborate remotely and use Git to manage versions more elegantly.

What's next for Rapid Raving Restaurant Roulette

We plan to implement an extending search radius if the user exhausts the initial search radius.

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