Inspiration
It is always challenging to decide on what to eat with what beverage you have at home. Or if you have guests coming over and you want to make the perfect food and drinks combo but don't know where to begin? PairIT is a one-stop solution for your food-related confusion. This portal will help you make quick choices and provide more personalized suggestions. As a company or a brand, is it difficult to push your product around? Or maybe you haven't really had the finances or reach that you expect. PairIT helps ease this problem as well. On PairIT we can help showcase new or best-selling products of companies that are upcoming, looking for a client base, or brands looking for reach. The customer will psychologically be loyal to the brand displayed since his choices are now based on his personality. The customer is highly likely to be a repeating customer due to the positive reinforcement that the food or beverage defines their personality.
What it does
This project will help you decide what food and drink to choose depending on how you feel at the moment in a gamified approach. It makes you answer a few questions to determine your current mood and personality in general. Depending on how you answer, you'll be matched with a perfect food and drinks combo that you can enjoy alone or with a group. The products displayed may be stock photos or brand-specific photos. You also get an option to try again if something doesn't seem right. But hey...you can't lie to yourself, can you?
How we built it
For this MVP, our current stack is pure React.js, JavaScript, Git, and of course vanilla HTML/CSS. Due to the time constraints, we avoided having a Node.js backend to make REST APIs, but we can expand on this project later. Each answer in the quiz is assigned a heuristic. The algorithm maximizes the score obtained by summing the heuristics and determining the closest match to the predefined alcohol and food score. We have deployed the gamified app on github pages by integrating the deployment via React builds. We also tried linting and unit testing our app through yaml deployments but it was a work in progress.
Challenges we ran into
We wanted to automate the process of github pull requests so we took up the challenge to explore github actions. Making the CI/CD pipeline foolproof is a good challenge to take up. We also ran into challenges around context providers and the ever-changing react router dom. Did you know switch is retired for routes? and router is now browserRouter? We also tried implementing lazy loading with ricky the brick as the official loading partner. This was a new venture too.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We got exposed to a lot of challenges that we have overcome and strive to overcome further. The fact that we could come up with a working MVP in less than 24 hours was a great achievement for us that helped motivate us. We wet our feet with lazy loading, github actions, and other cool features that we haven't usually tried.
What we learned
We learned that hard work and teamwork will definitely pay off. And also that you always need to check back with docs of react-router-dom.. you never know when they change things up. That coffee is not always the winner when it comes to keeping you up, excitement for the project can do the same. That tasks may look daunting at first, but you can't overcome what you don't try.
What's next for PairIT
PairIT will expand as a service for all food or drinks brands that would like to showcase their spirit to the audience in a fun and gamified way. The algorithm chosen can be expanded to become a classification or prediction problem in the AI domain. We can then also suggest the users a "people also drank" or "people also ate" page which can be a market basket expansion.
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