

Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer - davidcelis
https://goodbre.ws/

======
davidcelis
Thanks for looking guys. This site has been a side-project/hobby of mine for a
while now. The past few days for me have been spent rewriting it from the
ground up to be a much better site. I know that there are other beer sites out
there, but I think that there is something special about making a service like
this freely available and open source, and I'm really proud of what I've
created.

You can check out the code here: <https://github.com/davidcelis/goodbre.ws/>

The code that powers the recommendations themselves is here:
<https://github.com/davidcelis/recommendable/>

Any feedback would be nice. This new design is in its infancy but, as far as I
can tell, it's been very stable. If you find a bug, please, please let me know
here or post on the issues tracker.

~~~
dmix
This sites page loads are really fast. Well done in that respect.

~~~
davidcelis
PJAX, man. Loving it.

~~~
adastra
Whoa. Ok yeah that is seriously fast. This is the first I've heard of it -- if
anyone cares to comment, I'd be really interested to hear what the limitations
of pjax are. As used in this application anyway it's pretty impressive.

~~~
michaelkscott
If I recall correctly, it was written by github co-founder (defunkt) and
powers github. It's pretty solid.

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themanr
Maybe have some filtering by country visible on the home page. It took me a
while to figure out you actually had British beers in your database.

Also, I realise you're a ruby programmer but you should really consider
including Python IPA <http://littlevalleybrewery.co.uk/our-beers/python-ipa>
:)

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davedx
I'm getting a DNS lookup failure (I'm in the Netherlands).

~~~
mattdeboard
DNS failure, getting it here in the US

~~~
sodiumphosphate
+1

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agilebyte
Some of the letters that have diacritics are stripped:

"Leák" should be "Ležák" "Měťanský" should be "Měšťanský" "Velckopopovicky"
should be "Velkopopovický"

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Ecio78
I have problem risolving the site, dont know why, we have an internal DNS
server (but i see that google's 8.8.8.8 can resolve it..)

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the_bear
I rated a few beers, but my recommendation screen is empty. I get that it's a
new site, so I can accept that it might be tough to get recommendations right
away, but it would be really helpful to explain _why_ there aren't any
results. Is it because I haven't rated enough beers? Is it because there
aren't enough other users that have similar tastes? Is it because there's a
delay before results show up?

Also, I had to try searching for some beers multiple times because my search
didn't quite match how it's entered in your database. For example, I didn't
realize that "redhook" is one word instead of two. I know that search is
tricky and it's perfectly understandable, but I just thought I'd let you know.

Other than that, it looks great. I'll definitely be checking back for
recommendations in the future.

~~~
davidcelis
I had been monitoring that my background workers were, indeed, working... But
it seems as there's something else going on here. For some reason people
aren't getting recommendations. I'll try to see what's going on.

EDIT: looks like the process had actually silently died at some point, but was
still reporting as running. I think I've fixed the issue now.

------
LVB
Good site. Some comments:

\- After a search or going to my profile, getting back to my dashboard should
be more obvious.

\- "Fridge" is an odd term and icon for the want-to-try mark.

\- Can I submit beers?

Looking forward to updates.

~~~
davidcelis
Yeah, I'll be adding an additional and more obvious link back to the dashboard
soon. As far as submitting beers, that's also coming soon. I need to also make
it more easily to accept said beers into the database, as I'm the only person
working on the site. Managing this database (which has some 60,000 beers
currently) is really tough to do alone. Thank you for looking!

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joshschreuder
I like the design, it's quite clean. Your blogs make for interesting reading
too.

The concept reminds me of Untappd (<http://untappd.com/>) though theirs is a
mobile app.

I was also impressed that this didn't just limit down to American beers, but
it had some of my native Aussie beers also. Nice work!

Ideas:

\- Maybe load the beer names via AJAX for the search box so that I can get
suggestions of what I'm typing for.

\- Have a mouseover tooltip on the thumbs up/down, bookmark etc. buttons so
that I know what they do. It's not immediately obvious what the eye button
does.

~~~
davidcelis
That last idea is definitely something on my TODO. I give a brief rundown on
the /about page, but the tooltips would be useful. The first idea is a good
one as well, I'll be looking into how to cleanly implement that. Thank you!

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pstinnett
Not sure if you're managing your own DB or not but it might be worth looking
into <http://www.brewerydb.com/>

~~~
davidcelis
I actually thought long and hard about Brewery DB. Their API is just
fantastic, IMO. Really clean. Unfortunately, I wrote Recommendable (the Ruby
gem that I wrote to power the recommendations) in a way that it really relies
on ActiveRecord currently. My database also has considerably more beers than
BreweryDB does right now, but yeah. Managing it by myself slowly gets more
difficult as more and more suggestions on beers I need to add come my way. I'm
working on an admin section for me to manage that more easily.

~~~
pstinnett
Cheers! I've been wanting to make a beer app for a while and always had
BreweryDB in the back of my head. Maybe you should open up your database via
an API too:)

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jbarciauskas
My comment is that UX wise, I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing
on the site. It took me a few minutes to realize there was a search bar in the
upper right that really is the focus for finding the beer you like and seeding
the database to get recommendations. I'd add some sort of initial training
session, and generally feature the search bar as a sort of "improve your
recommendations, rate some beers!" feature.

~~~
davidcelis
Thanks, this is exactly the kind of thing I need to hear. As the person who
made the site, I already know how to use it. I'll look into ways to make this
all more obvious.

~~~
jlgreco
Also in the UX department, some search suggestions as you type could be nice,
if that wouldn't add too much cost. Not a deal-breaker by any means but I
found myself expecting it.

~~~
modarts
Minor recommendation on the search bar: the search button is a bit too small
of a target. I know that most sophisticated web users hit enter when
searching, but a sizable proportion are still click-happy.

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mmurph211
Nice site. I found all the beers I was searching for easily. I think I'd use
this more on my mobile phone while at the bar vs on my desktop.

~~~
davidcelis
Yeah if I knew Objective-C I'd code up an iOS app for the site. Once I know
for sure the desktop version is stable, I'll at the least be looking into
making a more mobile-friendly site.

~~~
jpadilla_
You can go with something like Titanium <http://www.appcelerator.com/>

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jpswade
Down for me...

<http://downorme.com/goodbre.ws>

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ndvivedi
Cool site! I would suggest trying to scrape taphunter.com to find beers to add
to your system. Doing that weekly for some of the bigger beer towns in the
country would add a bunch of brews to your list.

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recthing
For the non nerd two things: \- login via FB/Twitter would be nice \- user
voice (or similar) feedback instead of GitHub issues page: no non-coder is
gonna leave you feedback there!

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bproctor
You got a great start here. <http://www.brewgene.com/> exists, but I don't
think its recommendations are very good.

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HaloZero
How long until I can get recommendations? I rated a few beers but it would be
nice to have at least some kinda estimation on how many I would have to rate.

~~~
davidcelis
Recommendations start getting generated immediately after you rate a beer. The
site is in its infancy, of course, so recommendations may start out rocky but
they'll get better as more people (and you) rate more beers. The sad state of
the cold start!

How long it takes for the recommendations to refresh is tougher to say, but it
shouldn't be more than a few minutes. I can see that the workers that process
them are active, so I'm fairly sure it's working.

~~~
ajanuary
I've contemplated doing a similar thing but in a different domain (may take
advantage of your library). I had an idea for seeding the recommendations by
scraping reviews from review sites and mapping their ratings onto
likes/dislikes. Not sure how easy that would be though.

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tomd3v
Great! And also, this website is a great example how Twitter Bootstrap theme
should look like.

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leostera
DNS Lookup Failure in Argentina.

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kjell
See also: <http://brewtoad.com/>

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bkerensa
I dont trust code to suggest me beer.... my tastebuds own any script ;)

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Kartificial
Hmm, site seems to be down?

