Leafing

landing page
join us page
filter restaurants
add a restaurant
thank you for contributing
about us page

💡Inspiration

Research data from Statista and Statistics Canada has shown that "over 20 percent of Canadians observe some committed dietary regimen," and that "more than half (54%) of Canadians reported consuming food away from home at least once a week in 2016." Some of the most common dietary restrictions include vegan, vegetarianism, and gluten intolerance. Hence many problems arise as people with dietary restrictions needs to eat out more often, including the lack of restaurants which provide these special food options and the lack of platforms to share information about those restaurants that do exist. The motivation for this project, Leafing, came from the personal need to eat out with friends who have dietary restrictions.

🥬What it does

The web application, Leafing, serves as a tool and a community for people with dietary restrictions to share information about restaurants that provide those food options. The welcome/landing page of the website shows four popular dietary restrictions (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, and halal) which the user can click to see a list of restaurants in different cities and information about them (addresses, price levels, and ratings). The heading section of the web app contains a button to add restaurants to the database. The user can input information about a restaurant to benefit the rest of the community (name of restaurant, city, address, type of dietary restriction, price level, and ratings). Furthermore, we implemented filters that can sort the list of restaurants based on the type of dietary restriction, city, price range, and ratings.

🛠 How we built it

The front-end developers coded the website interface with HTML and CSS. The back-end developers converted the SQL database to Python and implemented the filter function which consists of subfunctions to filter each category of the data.

⚠️Challenges we ran into

All team members are fairly new to hackathons and have very limited experience. Git commit was complicated, and we almost lost files in the process of pushing code to GitHub. Fortunately, we successfully recovered from the commit history. Also, connecting Python to HTML is something all of us haven't done before and integrating front- and back-end was a fair challenge. The front-end developers on the team miscommunicated with back-end developers, which forced us to change part of the code; it was also not entirely smooth when the two front-end developers needed to merge files for different web pages. The back-end developers on the team considered coding the optimal algorithms for filtering and ranking the database was quite difficult. However, we worked tirelessly together to resolve all those issues.

🏆Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to be able to learn SQL within hours and be able to apply the knowledge immediately. We are also satisfied that the website pages run smoothly although we encountered some fixable minor issues. Our proudest accomplishment has to be successfully integrating SQL databases in Python with HTML (connecting front-end and back-end). In addition, we had a wonderful time working together with new friends and enjoyed our time at NewHacks. Since it is the first hackathon for most of the teammates and the first in-person hackathon for all of us, we are happy to have a functional project that serves the community.

🤯What we learned

Through learning SQL from scratch within hours and integrating front-end and back-end successfully on our first hackathon, we learned that the possibilities are boundless. I also recognized the importance of teamwork and communication, as well as the effectiveness of starting small and splitting larger tasks into smaller ones and distributing them. All members of the teams learned something new, including pushing/pulling and committing using GitHub, LiveShare using VSCode, SQL, using Python with SQL, integrating Python and HTML, simple animations with CSS, and more about HTML and CSS.

📈What's next for Leafing

We plan to create another database to store user information, so that users can star/favourite the restaurants they are interested in going to. We plan to add more options for filtering, so the lists of restaurants are more tailored to the needs of users. Also, we want to integrate with Google Maps to have a new window that navigates the user to the restaurant. Then, we will use machine learning to personalize restaurant suggestions. Eventually, we would love to upgrade Leafing from a web application to a mobile app map for people with dietary restrictions. Then, we are thinking about scaling up the community and creating a space for people with dietary restrictions to share ideas and experiences. We want Leafing to be the next Google Map that serves a small proportion of the community, but greatly impacts their lives positively by making eating out with friends a hundred times easier.