Space Collab

Inspiration

In recent times, space research has become a new race between countries and private organisations. Although, our past experience suggests that “Collaboration is important in maintaining a consistent pace of scientific discovery.” Therefore, I was inspired to build an application that encourages a collaborative approach to space research, thereby aiding the expansion of our current scientific understanding.

What it does

Space Collab provides a platform for individual scientific researches and organisations to collaborate on space research projects.

How I built it

Space Collab is a Flask application that uses Google’s Firebase realtime database to store user information. I also used Firebase authentication to handle passwords and user login. This was made possible by utilising Pyrebase, a Python wrapper to handle Firebase commands in Flask. The website also makes use of Google Maps Javascript API as well as geocoding API for the functionality of google maps. The frontend was designed using HTML, CSS and Bootstrap framework.

Challenges I ran into

This was my first time working with Firebase database and authentication, which meant that I spent a majority of time learning how to use firebase. However, I am glad to have learnt a new skill in this hackathon. I also struggled with time management and that's something I hope to improve in future hackathons.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I enjoy working as part of teams, although, I took it as a challenge to complete a project by myself this time. I am proud of completing the basic functionality and the UI design of the website as this was my first time using CSS animations for the frontend.

What I learned

This hackathon gave me the experience of using a variety of web technologies and helped me gain confidence in my skills. Besides, completing a project by myself has made me more appreciative of the importance of team-work and collaborative problem-solving.

What's next for Space Collab

Since I was restricted with time, I could not include a custom chat application on the website. This is something I would like to work on in the future. I also plan on deploying the website in the upcoming days.

Built With

• firebase
• flask
• geocoding-api
• google-maps
• javascript
• pyrebase