what2eat

what2eat is an app that helps friends eat together by choosing restaurants everyone likes. It's hard to coordinate schedules and even harder to coordinate tastes.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the WhenToMeet website (when2meet.com), a webapp that helps people plan events by having coordinating users' schedules. The UI/UX for WhenToMeet is far from perfect, and we thought that we could do it better while solving a problem that our group had - coordinating meals. Eating out with friends should be fun and painless, but before when2eat, the event planner would often spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find a restaurant that everyone liked. With the constant pressure put on by classes, we want to make moments with friends as easy and painless as possible, and hopefully encourage people to take more time off and explore Berkeley.

How We built it

We built our frontend using ReactJs, and our backend using Python. We used MaterialUI to try to create a clean and professional looking website that's actually live! None of us working on the frontend had any experience with it, but it was pretty intuitive to pick up. For the backend, we hosted a Flask API on Heroku, which proved to be quite the challenge because we had no experience with Heroku, but it was a learning experience. We also used cockroachDB, a CalHacks sponsor, as our database management system, which turned out to be a really useful product!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're all seniors so this is our last CalHacks. We're all proud that we managed to get a website online after several less-successful hackathons. It was a great time working together and we enjoyed the little moments of triumph.

What's next for what2eat

We have a lot of stretch features we wanted to implement but did not get around to finishing. Our immediate stretch goals were being able to suggest restaurants based on preferences and filters based on the dietary restrictions of a group. We are already integrating the Yelp API to get restaurant information, so we also considered being able to make reservations from our application. If you read this far, I'm proud of you!!!

Thank you to CalHacks and all the sponsors for putting on such a great event!

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