StreetBite / FoodTrucker

Street Bite is an ambitious project built for a client who needed a way to aggregate street-food vendors in the wide London area. I have dealt with the front-end development and created a fully functional web application. The users can look up vendors either by searching for a specific food/cuisine or by browsing the interactive map and selecting their market of choice. Administrator could add new vendors, edit existing ones, and manage the whole platform and it's users.

The client arrived with the UI/UX design already resolved, so my job was turning it into a working front end against the Express and MongoDB API. Four kinds of account had to be served from one interface: foodies browsing for somewhere to eat, brands representing an individual stand, markets aggregating those brands into one location, and the administrator on the business owner's dashboard. Each gets a different shape of the same product, which meant a custom authorization layer and panels that change with who is signed in.

Search was the interesting problem. Both routes into the data, the text box and the map, have to land on the same result set, and a market is only a useful answer if it sits inside the area being looked at and is actually trading at the time being asked about. So the Algolia index had to carry geography and opening times alongside the text fields and resolve all three at once. Mapbox handled the map itself, with custom interactions rather than stock markers.