Pick3

initial selection
winner winner spaghetti dinner

Inspiration

My partner actually came up with this game since neither of us can ever decide where we want to go whenever we're trying to go out for a quick meal. She would pick three places she'd be okay with getting food from and we'd eliminate from there.

What it does

This program uses the Foursquare Places API to find three "dining and drinking" establishments in your area. The user is prompted to enter their location, city or zip code will work, before being presented with three choices. The user selects one result to eliminate and the program flips a coin on the last one. The final result is where you'll go.

How we built it

We made 2 repos for this. Our front-end was built with SvelteKit and TailwindCSS, hosted on Netlify. The back-end for fetching FourSquare's api with the sdk, built with Express.js and hosted on Render. JS for the win.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulty with fetching a custom API because of a CORS issue. first time learning objects :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was a very last minute thing for the both of us. Battling both of our busy schedules we threw this together over the weekend to get our submission in. This is my (Julien's) first time building anything in javascript as well so I'm personally very proud of our finished result. Jacob has way more experience and his patience and insight were amazing. Genuinely amazing at explaining and teaching concepts without just writing something for me.

What we learned

As stated previously, this was my first time building anything in Javascript. I was forced into an understanding of manipulating objects in order to pull useful information from the foursquare API. While Jacob did almost all of the front-end development for our program, I learned a lot about the basics of web hosting and what it takes to bring a silly little game out of the terminal and into a space that me and my friends can use. This is also my first time needing to use GIT for a project. Jacob learned how to use render and svelte transitions.

What's next for Pick3

The foursquare API is a very powerful tool that provides so much information that it'd be almost trivial to fine tune this application. For picking three establishments, I'd like to add filters that only allow places within certain budgets or taxonomies show up in the pool of choices. As of right now you could get Starbucks and Connor's Steakhouse in the same round but they're not very comparable choices. Picking between three sit down restaurants is also a lot different than picking between three fast food joints.

Beyond that, you could use pick three to really take you anywhere! The API allows you to pull data about any local spot. You can make it tell you about trails and parks, recreational activities, entertainment centers, and even more serious things like colleges or health care providers. I'm not sure I'd personally let Pick3 choose my dentist but you could if you wanted to!

At its heart Pick3 is just a game my partner and I would play to find a quick bite and it's supposed to be fun and a little random. Ultimately I'd love to see it turn into a "choose your own adventure" type game that could help us plan an entire day out. I'd love to eliminate and flip through choices of local places until I know where I'm going to lunch, what we're doing for the afternoon, and where we're going to dinner before we call it quits for the day.