LineTracker

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  LineTracker Home Page

LineTracker is a crowd-sourced web map that aims to reduce the amount of time consumers wait in line during the pandemic. Many businesses employ social distancing lines to minimize the density of people in the store, but these lines often cause long queue times. If users are notified of estimated wait time and line sizes, they can make better decisions of where to shop. It is especially important that we minimize the time spent outside the home, as families want to stay away from public places. On the other hand, we have witnessed firsthand the grim effects the pandemic has had on small businesses. We believe this product will help these businesses get back on their feet as they will often not have lines, compared to larger businesses. Thus, it serves as a marketing tool for these smaller businesses. Our app uses the Yelp business search API to get a list of all relevant businesses within your area and displays it on an interactive map. On the left side, there is a search button, a radius slider, and a location finder. The search button allows you to search for businesses. The radius slider limits your search from 1km to 40km. And the location finder centers the search around your location.

This was by no means an easy task. Our group of four invested our entire weekend into learning MongoDB, PHP, and HTML/CSS, using Python as our integrated language. We used many different APIs including IP API and Yelp API, which were quite difficult to implement. One of the most difficult things was coordinating our work through Git’s version control system. We were used to working alone on Git but having four members all committing code was quite difficult to manage and resolve merge conflicts. At the end of the day, we are proud of our final product and we believe there is room for further improvement and automation.

We learned how to communicate our ideas clearly and concisely. There are many hardships of working remotely in a team. For instance, answering someone is more difficult than answering someone in person. We helped mitigate this by sharing our screens. Whenever one of us had an issue, we would share our screens to the other group members so they could see and answer our problem.

One notable challenge we faced was the fact that we were completing a five man project with a four man team. One of our group members dropped out after we delegated roles to each member, increasing the burden upon each remaining member. To overcome this, we stayed up later than usual. Another difficulty was our spotty Internet connection - something out of our control.

Built With

• css
• html
• ip
• javascript
• mongodb
• python
• yelp