UMenu
Description as a Tweet:
Do you keep missing cinnamon bun pancakes at late night? Don't know when the next time clam chowder will be? Follow your favorite UMass Dining foods by tracking their history so that you know when they'll be served next with UMenu!
Inspiration:
I kept missing certain foods in the dining hall and wanted to have a way to predict when they'd be served next, maybe learn if there was a pattern to some.
What it does:
A web-app that looks at the UMass dining hall menu data and makes predictions on when certain foods will appear next. Also provides a quick history of when that food last appeared, its nutrition facts, and a nice graph showing weekly appearances.
View at: http://www.umenu.tech/
How we built it:
I used Ruby on Rails hosted on Heroku along with an AWS RDS PostgreSQL database for storing all the foods and when they were served.
Technologies we used:
- HTML/CSS
- SQL
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
Challenges we ran into:
Figuring out the math for calculating dates and making prediction models out of it was certainly challenging as I don't have a huge background in stats. Also this was my first time using AWS so setup took a bit longer than it could have.
Accomplishments we're proud of:
I'm really proud of how far it got, I think it looks really good and I'm glad I got to use a few new technologies I've been meaning to try out.
What we've learned:
How to integrate Heroku with AWS and then using Yarn for the first time was good as well. I also learned that
What's next:
Right now it only takes menu data from Worcester, but I want to expand this to the four main dining halls and then adding more stats would really top it off. A mobile app would be handy as well. Lots of ideas.
Built with:
Just my laptop and my brain.
Prizes we're going for:
- Best Web App
- Best AWS Hack
- Best Domain Registered with Domain.com