NEEDS

Inspiration

From the start NEEDS knew that we wanted to develop a website, so we churned through many, many awful ideas, until an even worse one got thrown out: a dating app for homeless individuals. That created a spark, from there we looked into how big of an issue homelessness is in The United States, its actually so pervasive in fact that congress estimated that there were 580,466 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2020. From there we decided on our original website idea, but we would to our best to try to provide some sort of resource to the affected people.

What it does

Needs is a small application aimed towards those who have a harder time accessing basic day-to-day resources. Its a website that takes a user's location and then returns multiple names and locations of nearby businesses that are able to meet that need in some capacity, whether that's for a search for food, so a local food pantry is shown, or for wifi where maybe a coffee shop would be the closest source. Either way, we are making a tool to make life easier for someone else.

How we built it

As Needs is just a web page at this point, a majority of the front end is written in strictly HTML and CSS, however without a CSS framework. We pass data from the user to our backend which is written in Node.js, using express.js and axios to receive and send HTTP requests. Responses from Google Maps Places API are then parsed and sent to the front end for display.

Challenges we ran into

As a group we are almost completely new to developing in teams, so automatically, we were challenged as we didn't have the fore site to design it well enough so our front end team knew what data we needed, and what data we were sending. So, from the start we were fighting a battle we didn't know yet existed. We handled this issue through consistent, effective communication.

However, one challenge that we were aware of from the start was unfamiliarity of needed languages. Going into it we understood we didn't have an extensive web-dev back ground, so we knew that if we did not learn the concepts, it would not finish. We met this challenge by asking many, many questions, and doing a lot of on-the-fly google searches.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the beginning, our web page was just one large HTML and JavaScript blob, our API key was just on the web for anyone to see, but we had a pretty well functioning product. However, we were told that in the "real world", that is not really how that works, and that we should develop our own API and pass values back to our front end through that (this was disastrous as our back end team knew nothing about either API or JavaScript). However, our entire team pulled through as we were not only able to implement the backend, but also able to switch from the blob from earlier into an overall better design.

What we learned

Every team member on NEEDS is going to have a different story on what they learned, but we all gained a familiarity to the entire development process, beginning to end. Some specific learning experiences that we did have however, were with the Google maps API, and APIs in general, with which we had no prior experience. Moreover, over 75% of our program is written in vanilla JavaScript or Node.js both of which none of us had done more than glanced at before this.

What's next for NEEDS

The next step for NEEDS is to put the front end on the framework react.js so that we can make the entire site more scalable, and better equipped to handle more and more information.