RoastApp is an online map of Chicagoland coffee roasteries
Roastapp helps find, price, and evaluate freshly roasted coffee beans in and around Chicago.
My goals of RoastApp are:
- List as many local roasters as possible
- Allow some degree of price comparison
- Make all of the available roasts searchable/indexable
- Illustrate the roasters on a map
- Avoid using any Google/Facebook/Amazon products
The core of the app is a reasonably simple Create, Read, Update, Destroy (CRUD) system built with Django and an extremely spartan design. The hard part is collecting and entering all of the data – most of my time building this website has been data entry.
During data collection I discovered the existence of ‘whiskey barrel-aged’ coffee beans. I wanted to know where I could get them – since I had a database full of beans I added search functionality and now you can quickly find all the different barrel-aged roasts in Chicago or ‘dark‘ or ‘light‘ or beans from Guatemala.
This app has also given me lots of latitude to think about database data taxonomy. The idea for the app came from the want of a list of all the different coffee roasters and roasts. I typically make a spreadsheet for as I find an interesting dataset, but a spreadsheet becomes a burden for data with complex relationship. ‘Roasts to shops to roasters’ was plain and simple too much for that.
As I add more roasts and roasters to the database there is more and more data to process in new ways. From the start of development a core piece of data is the price per gram. The most expensive roast I found was a wine-barrel aged variety(sadly, no longer available) that cost $330 for 10.3 ounces of coffee (~$1.13/gram).
