Ruakaa

Overview & background

Ruakaa was a team project at Mankeli Solutions, not my own. I was a key contributor to its design and architecture.

As new students, we found it hard to remember where each student restaurant was. Comparing the food and finding the menus meant checking several sources. The idea behind Ruakaa was to put all of this in one place, including a quick view of your favorite restaurants.

It tackled three everyday problems:

• Finding where each restaurant is.
• Menus spread across different sources.
• No way to save favorite restaurants.

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Development process

We designed a simple interface built around a map of student restaurants.

The menus came from public APIs that varied a lot in format and structure. With no standard format across the sources, this was a major challenge.

Once a day, the menus were fetched, cleaned with regular expressions and stored in Firebase in one consistent structure that the app read. Some errors still slipped through now and then, but most of the time the data was reliable.

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Outcome

The app had:

• A map of nearby student restaurants.
• Saved favorite restaurants for quick access.
• Menus from different restaurants in one consistent format.

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Next steps

• Add localization for Finnish, English and Swedish. Not every restaurant published its menu in all three languages.
• Let users save their favorite meals.
• Notify users when their favorite dishes are on the menu.

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Technologies & tools

• Dart / Flutter
• Firebase