Inspiration

This project is motivated by the largest issue with social distancing: people. Currently, there is no good way to tell how many people are at a location, and without that information, people can't make informed decisions on when or where they should go out.

What it does

The solution is two-front. We have an API hosted on AWS that uses a web scrapper to locate current location data on Google maps. This is fed into our website that displays the information in a clean and minimal format.

How we built it

We built the web scrapper in Python and JavaScript, and we built the website in Javascript, HTML, and CSS using the React library and Material-ui framework.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was allowing the hosting API to be called from the website. As the website is hosted locally right now, we don't have CORS policy compliance, and so the requests have to be passed through a proxy server to allow the API calls to go through.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our solution to the problem, and we are proud that the website works at all.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development, the challenges involved, and the process of solving the related problems. We also learned about the API pricing, marketing techniques, and financial outlook of our endeavour. Probably the most important part though is that we learned a lot about topics we're all unfamiliar with.

What's next for Forecast

Ideally, we would implement the features proposed in our video. Adding further support for browser extensions, mobile applications, user profiles, and more would definitely add more functionality and appeal to the website.

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