Coronavirus Pandemic Global Update

The Main Page on desktop
The News Page on desktop
The main page on mobile
The News page on mobile

Inspiration

Since the COVID-19 is becoming global pandemic, our humanity are facing the biggest challenge right now. To share the correct information seems like the right job for us to do as programmers

What it does

Our website has two major functionalities, one is the detailed covid-19 information for each countries, the another part is news section, which has updated news from different sources about covid-19.

How I built it

Start from information gathering, creating out own database using mongodb. We do not have that much resources to gather all the information across the internet, so we found these website which has fully updated information for each country. So build a crawler to get the information from it and updated it to our database. Then we build a backend using Express JS, which our front-end can get the information from API calls. Then we build the front-end, which is the biggest challenge, we need to found out the best looking UI that viewer can locate the information quickly, and all the component that can interact with each other.

Challenges I ran into

The crawler is hard that we need to connect our database to the python, and since JSON format is different than Python dictionary. So it took us a long time to build the correct schema.
The front-end structure is hard, using react first time is learning and writing the code at the same time.
To Deployed our backend and crawler to AWS is hard, setting up the crontab to run the script every hour, and pm2 the back-end
Move our front-end to S3 and get the ssl correctly under the DNS, and using Cloudfront to store our static file in the cache took me a long time

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The website that we crawler from make 'Hong Kong', 'Taiwan' and 'Maco' to countries, I made it always belong to CHINA, And in fact, it always belong to CHINA!!!
That our website support both mobile and desktop