Google Maps Hackathon: Events Near Here

Have you ever stumbled upon an exciting event while exploring a city? Those can end up becoming very memorable experiences. Our app aids in discovering the nearby exciting events around you!

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Inspiration

There have been many times where my friends or partner and I have been walking around the city or exploring a new area and stepped across events that became highlights and memorable experiences. Some of these include Germanfests, public concerts, bonfire celebrations on the beach and more. With that in mind, we wanted to create something that would connect exciting events with those that are nearby geographically who may not be aware of it.

What it does

Our app is aimed to help events and individuals connect by showing an easy to understand web app of how close these events and individuals are geographically. By being geographically close, these individuals might be more interested in attending the events that they might not otherwise have known about.

Events can include a wide variety of options. This can encompass concerts, festivals, celebrations, happy hours, etc.

Our app currently scrapes the Indy event site for data and displays it as markers on the map. There is also the option to add an event if a user were to be an event coordinator.

How we built it

REPOSITORY: https://github.com/w3tsa/hackathon

The project is built with React, Google Cloud Functions and Scheduler, and Supabase. We used the Maps and Geocoding API for this project and had a great time learning a lot of new technologies in the process.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges include using CRON jobs for web scraping. While there were some API's that provided general larger event data in a variety of locations, we were looking for events that were more off the beaten path. Events hosted by museums, parks, bars, and others were more abundant and more unique to the city. We did not have experience working with Cloud Products, so setting up Cloud Functions and Scheduler required extra learning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely happy to have deployed an MVP of our idea with tools that we were not always familiar with. We had many firsts for this including setting up web scraping, using Cloud Products, and utilizing Supabase.

What we learned

As mentioned above, we learned a lot about Google Cloud and Supabase. But we also learned a lot about the power of Google Maps!

What's next for Indy Google Maps Hackathon

There are a lot of things that we would love to continue building on. This project has been very encouraging to learn more about GCP. We also would love to add more user features such as recommendations and login capabilities.

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