Dining Options Selector

Inspiration

Where do I eat today? This question catches our team members and many other UCLA students on the spot nearly every day. Many just end up going to the closest option available. Often students with special food restrictions or preferences are left unsatisfied with meals in dining halls. Search on the UCLA dining menus website does not allow you to choose specific food preferences making this process especially frustrating. Thus, we decided to make the process of dining hall selection easy and fast.

What it does

You can choose the date, meal, dining hall, and food preferences, and it will provide you with specific food options available for given input data.

How we built it

We used React for the frontend and Python for the backend. We used Django to connect them together.

Challenges we ran into

We did not expect there to be so many challenges with linking up the front and backends. Going from HTML to React for the Front end and Python to Django on the backend took a lot of time and effort. We ran into unexpected errors and they were hard to solve. Also, we started coding the front end in HTML but realized we had to use React instead. Since none of us have worked with React or HTML, we had to learn React before we could code anything.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of learning the basics of HTML, React, and CSS in one day. We were a team of random strangers but communicated very well and had a vision. I am proud that we grinded as well as we did and made it through TWELVE hours of coding.

What we learned

We learned that we can learn things faster than we thought and that no obstacle was too big for us to overcome. We learned about functions, props, asynchronous javascript, await, and many other things. We learned the benefits of different languages and their downfalls. We learned about git as well.

What's next for Dining Options Selector

We want to continue to develop this DOS so that it can function on a daily (hourly) basis, and expand its functionality to include things like dining hall capacity (& full) and machine learning so that it can make recommendations to you about which dining hall you may enjoy on a particular day.