Eatspo

Eatspo is a food-centered social media app, intended for anyone with an interest in great cuisine! With endless inspiration from friends, families and peers, picking your next meal will be a breeze.

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Inspiration

Both members of our team are major foodies, and love visiting new places, and cooking new dishes. With so many different cuisines, and so many amazing restaurants and dishes to choose from, it can be challenging to make a decision. With Eatspo, you can get direct inspiration from your friends, families and peers, and get a direct feed of all the different foods they are trying. When someone you know has already tried it, the process becomes much easier and way more fun.

What it does

With the Eatspo App, individuals can post any recent foods they have tried, whether that's at a restaurant, or a home cooked meal. These posts include pictures, location details (for restaurants), and recipes (for home cooked meals). This allows one to effortlessly fill their feed with various posts of unique dishes to view, and take inspiration from.

How we built it

We built this project using a MERN stack, and by following lots and lots of online tutorials and documentation.

Challenges we ran into

Having very minimal experience with creating a full stack application, we had to research and learn almost every component that was involved with development process. Also having just a team of 2, the process was long, and took from early in the morning, finishing late into the night. Many times throughout this process, we hit dead ends, and lots of road blocks, which were very discouraging and demotivating; however, that made finishing feel even more satisfying.

For the frontend, using Axios to connect to the backend was very challenging and time consuming, as neither of us had much experience with that at all. Also state management for react was quite tricky.

For the backend, creating custom Javascript functions to carry out our desired behavior was very challenging. A lot of the documentation for some functionalities was limited, and required either lots of research and learning, or troubleshooting and brute force testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working together, after lots of hard work and struggling, we are absolutely thrilled to have completed our goal, and are so excited and happy to go from nothing, to a functioning application.

We learnt so much about creating a full stack application, and got to gain lots of valuable experience and familiarity with various tools and resources for developing applications. Being able to self learn and apply these concepts towards something fun and personal, is an accomplishment we are very proud of.

What we learned

For this project, we decided to go with a MERN stack, which consists of MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.js. We used this alongside a Restful API to create our application.

Through following lots of guides and documentation, we were able to successfully set up a server with Node, and create Javascript models on top of a NoSQL MongoDB database. Using React, we were able to set up our front-end, and link it to the backend using Express.

We were also able to set up a Google Cloud Storage platform, and integrate that into our application for image handling

What's next for Eatspo

There are many different paths Eatspo could take going forward, with lots of opportunities to expand and grow. We could introduce customizing options, such as filtering by cuisine, location, ingredient (etc). We could also introduce Eatspo challenges and events, involving various restaurants and dishes, to help get users even more excited about trying new food.

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