Inspiration
I have always loved the food at UMass. The school offers their students 4 dining halls, meaning the there is a huge variety of food on campus. It can sometimes be hard to decide which dining hall to go to to get the most out of the campus food experience. Some foods I certainly look forward to more than others. With this website, I hope to make deciding what dining hall to go to become a breeze.
What it does
This website uses the UMass dining database to display the foods from all 4 dining halls so you can select your favorite foods, and a calendar will be made for when they are available and where.
How we built it
This website was built entirely using the React framework. The database was created using a Python program which grabbed the data from the UMass dining API.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge I ran into was time management. I started this project late after switching over from another project so I had less than half the time to work on it. Also, developing the page so it could properly work for mobile and desktop was the hardest issue I faced. I didn't want to make two separate pages, just for mobile and desktop.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I am very proud of this idea. This is definitely a website that I will regularly use in my everyday life to help me decide what dining halls to go to, and I'm sure my friends will appreciate it too.
What we learned
I learned more about using React for developing websites. I am quite familiar with React native but doing this project has expanded my knowledge about React to help me create more future projects.
What's next for UMenus
There is certainly a lot of potential with this website. UMenus first needs to automatically scrape the UMass dining database instead of me having to manually upload it myself. This is the main funtional component that needs to be added. I also would like to implement a better design for the website. Other than that, other ideas that would be implemented next would be features that better recommend to the user food items based on previous favorites and future food items that might be rarer than others. Sorting food items based on food type and rarity should be an option too. And of course, adding the dates list to a Google calendar should be an option as well. There's so many possibilities!
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