covid-tracker

Inspiration

We are inspired by COVID-19 trackers and curious about the technology behind making our own.

What it does

It has two functionalities which allow you to search for COVID-19 reports based on countries or states and provide local COVID-19 reports. It has a broad database containing multiple countries and states, with data that is updated daily.

How we built it

We used Flask for our backend and HTML/CSS for our frontend. We used a lot of API's to retrieve the information that we needed to display to the user. This required JSON files and even some interaction between Python and JavaScript, easily done through Jinja, a web template engine included with Flask. We made our graphs with "chartist.js". We used Heroku to host our webpage online. Since we had three people on our team what we did was we split up the work between ourselves. This helped us finish lots of functionalities quicker since people didn't have to wait for other people to finish to get started.

Challenges we ran into

We had an assumption that there will be a theme announced for this hackathon but we came to realize that there wasn't. This was a challenge because we had lots of choices to choose from as a team but we collaborated our way through. We chose a video-calling platform initially but we came to realize two hours after starting that it was way too advanced for our skill levels. So we decided to choose this project because the utility for it was very high and it seemed very fun. We got started but working with API's was a challenge because we had to find the right one and get the right data. We ran into so many problems so that meant we had to spend a lot of time debugging. The graph part was also really difficult because we had to communicate with Chartist.js and that meant that somehow the data from python had to communicate with the data in JavaScript. We approached this problem with a lot of strategies until one actually worked. Many of our teammates got very tired because of staying late but we worked through that challenge by taking breaks to gain energy to finish the project successfully.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of actually finishing the project and seeing it work as it was intended too.

What we learned

We learned how to use Flask and its tools, and how that interacts with our frontend. We learned about PeerJs and WebRTC because of our initial start in the video calling application. We learned how to make graphs with Chartist.js and how to deploy our website through Heroku.

What's next for covid-tracker

We should make the UI and design more appealing and modern. We should add more data so that every country and state that was in the search form could be usable. We also want to automatically use geolocation API's to make the process of location setting for the program easier.