Wild Blue

Platform for measuring the impact of the small decisions you make.

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Inspiration

I was inspired to make this because I realized that we always hear about how we have to do little things to make a big difference, but it always feels quite disjointed with reality. After all, we often think that carpooling "this one time" won't make a difference, or that recycling "this one bottle" won't make a difference. Because of this, I made Wild Blue.

What it does

Wild Blue allows you to measure the positive impact you have on the environment from all of the small things you do. Whenever you do something good for the environment, you click "Mark As Done" for that thing on the website. The website looks at the footprint of what you did, and adds to your total. Over time, you can see that all of the tiny things you do really do make a big difference.

How I built it

Due to limitations in time, I couldn't use as advanced code as I would have liked to. Originally, I had been thinking of using PostgreSQL or MongoDB, but both of these take much longer to set up and use. Instead, I decided to use ReplDB, a simple key-value database. I held the UID of the user as the key, and the data of the user (in JSON format) as the value. In order to create an authentication feature, I used Firebase. The website is hosted on an express server (in NodeJS) and uses HTML and CSS for the display.

Challenges I ran into

The main challenge was time limitation. It was hard to finish some of the things I wanted to do within 8 hours, so I had to give up on some features I was originally going to include. The other challenge was finding the carbon footprints of some of the actions included in the website. It was rather difficult to find reliable sources that told me how many pounds of carbon dioxide are saved from doing an action.

What I learned

I learned more about how to authenticate users with Firebase. I also developed my skill at creating reliable architecture in a database, especially when mixing the offerings of two databases (ie: Firebase, ReplDB). Thirdly, I learned about how to do complicated functions using simple software and code.

What's next for Wild Blue

I plan to develop this much further. Some of the new features I want to include in the future are measuring your "baseline impact", or how much your normal footprint is, so that you can see how you are actually impacting your footprint as a whole, and a function to recommend actions to you. I also hope to make this into a mobile app, which is more convenient for a user. Lastly, I want to introduce a leader-board, especially between "friends", in order to encourage competitiveness, and thus, to encourage people to lower their footprint.

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