Tastebuds

taste preference form
join room page
results page
restaurant card

Inspiration

A random spark of inspiration that arose from a common problem among university students, a group of friends looking for a place to eat after a long day of work but with one big issue: What do we get?

What it does

TasteBuds is an easy to use restaurant recommendation app designed for groups of students who are hungry but indecisive.

How we built it

TasteBuds is a Next.js web app built with shadcn/ui and socket.io. The app has a kahoot-style synchronised voting system that multiple users connect to throughs WebSockets, and ultimately decide from a list of restaurants served by Google's new Places API.

Challenges we ran into

Coming into the project with 0 experience around WebSockets and real world APIs and live polling like behaviour, as well as an unclear design direction, our team found ourselves having to quickly adopt new and un-familar technologies to steer the idea into fruition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud of creating a lobby like system that updates each user live, as well as an end result that we personally want to use.

What we learned

As well as learning and becoming familiar with the new technologies sockets.io and the Google Places API, we also learn valuable lessons about group project management, delegating tasks to everyone and ensuring the project progresses smoothly with as little code conflicts as possible

What's next for tastebuds

The obvious next step is properly deploying both a node.js backend and frontend to be used by anyone on the web, and porting the app to mobile through Swift/Kotlin was always in the original plans for the idea.