Essentials-Only, Web Dev.

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project was the importance of correctly informing the public of COVID-19.

Unfortunately, we did not get far in to development as we had hoped for. Our intention was to provide maps that inform the public of infection density as well as provide locations where one can be tested. Right now our website at best informs the public of general information regarding COVID-19. It has a home page, about us page, educational page, and a testing page. The testing page includes a Google Map with no information related to COVID-19.

We built it by creating a virtual machine within Google Cloud. Once we created the virtual machine, we started installing all the packages and languages we needed. We grabbed a free API-key in order to implement the Google Maps included within More > Testing Facilities.

Making sure all of our team members understood how we setup the virtual machine to run a website using Django and Apache. Attempting to implement a database/verify users to sign up/login with PHP/Node.js was scrapped due to the limited time. Grabbing a free API-key from Google was another challenge as none of were familiar with it. We attempted to involve other maps that are well known to the public but grabbing a free API-key was nearly impossible for these particular maps. Some of our team members had absolutely no experience with the languages we used in this project.

Being able to educate and thoroughly explain the steps necessary to implement and execute a website. We made sure all of our team members knew how the back end worked despite having little to no experience with web developing and programming.

We learned the compatibility issues one faces across various packages/languages/machines. Thoroughly understand how the backend works as well as the benefits to using Django/Apache. We fine tuned our python/javascript/html abilities as well as system commands. None of us knew we were capable of hosting a website for little to no money until now. We learned what it takes to setup a website and that developing a well polished website takes more than a day of crunching code. Discovered a wide range of resources and how to use them. This will allow us to broaden our skill set and continue advancing in our technological world.