Inspiration
All of us have had to go through the tedious process of finding a good laptop -- looking at tons of review sites, comparing the dozens of specs that each laptop has to find the best one for our needs. We realized that there was a missing niche for an easy-to-use laptop recommendation system that ranks laptops based on objective measures combined with the users' subjective value assessment, allowing them to Get Good Tech.
What it does
It is a website that, when accessed, displays a minimal interface which gives the user the option to select a price range, as well as rank various laptop factors (e.g. performance, battery quality, etc.) as more or less important. Then we go through our laptop database and find the examples which best fit their criteria.
How we built it
The data was collected via web scraping from e-tailers and other performance databases and synthesized using Python + Jupyter notebook. The app itself was written in Flask and hosted with Heroku.
Challenges we ran into
None of us had much experience with Flask, so it was a learning experience for all of us. Also, we didn't know the most effective way of getting data about the specs and performance of various laptops, so we spent a significant amount of time exploring multiple avenues for data collection and aggregation there.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We managed to get a functional product out of it, despite our lack of experience.
What we learned
For one, web apps are hard (even seemingly trivial ones). For two, finding useful resources and APIs can make the difference between a failed hack and a successful one.
What's next for Get Good Tech
In the future, we hope to expand the feature set as well as use formal API processes and diversify the set of accessed e-tailers.
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