A fully functioning REST API for University of Georgia dining hall information.
Around the second month of my freshman year at UGA, I discovered that the dining halls serve banana pudding. I love banana pudding. Much to my disappointment, as weeks passed by with no banana pudding to be found, it became clear that it was a rare commodity in the dining halls. I searched desperately for a pattern, trying to figure out which days they would serve the delicacy. Was it every other Thursday? Was it only served in certain halls? Who knew. Finally, fed up with this deprivation, I asked an employee for the banana pudding schedule. He directed me to the UGA dining website where suddenly I discovered an excess of dining hall information.
Full menus up to seven days in advance. Occupancy percentages. Nutrition facts. Everything was available but not terribly accessible. You couldn't search for an item. The site was hardly mobile-friendly. Locating banana pudding was a tedious chore. This little-known wealth of information was too inconvenient to use, its vast potential unrealized.
And so this project was born.
For phase 1, I have put together a comprehensive REST API which provides all the dining hall information you could think of. The API, created with Python and the Django REST Framework, scrapes dining hall data daily from UGA's dining site, structuring the data and providing it at easily accessible endpoints. You can access menus, a full list of food items, nutrition facts, hours and days of operation, and occupancy percentages. For phase 2, I am writing a mobile app which uses this API to provide searchable menus, favoritable items, open/closed status, calorie and nutrition tracking, and more. In the meantime, check out the API below.
descriptionDocumentationtouch_appalexcostaluiz.com/ugadining/api
