cafeboxd

Location-based cafe discovery & rating

Role

Everything

Date

2024

Links

As the typical coffee shop enjoyers, my wonderful girlfriend and I set out to create a stack ranking of all the shops we had visited. As avid Letterboxd users, it did not take long to realize there would be a more fun and effective solution than a Google Sheet.

Hence, cafeboxd was born. The goal of creating a ranking evolved into a full blown journal and location-based discovery app, custom built and tailored for an audience of 2.

I utilized CoreLocation + Google Places API to handle the search & discovery, and Firebase to handle all the database needs with a basic auth flow. Core features included nearby cafe poplulation, searching, logged visits per individual location with averaged ratings on mulitple visits, and sorting to quickly view most recent visits/highest rated in the journal.

It works fairly well for our needs, but also taught me a valuable lesson about being too close to user feedback. I would have generalized and released on the App Store, but also learned another valuable lesson about just how expensive the Google Places API is to tap, so this one will not be making it out of the Testflight.