The Greenhorn’s Garden

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Inspiration

For this project, we drew a lot of inspiration from one of our team members who recently has taken up gardening. Gardening is great because you get the pleasure of growing your own food and being more environmentally sustainable. We wanted to help people who are new to gardening with some basic tips, and easily accessible location data, which is all within a website that is visually appealing.

What it does

This app provides a one stop shop for beginner gardeners. First we have a map of the USA (the location we believe our core audience will be located). It provides general information on climate and rainfall. On another page, we go over what kind of plants would thrive in their area of interest to help our user base get started on gardening. All of this comes together with our live map of temperature, precipitation, and cloud coverage so people know exactly when and how they should take care of their plants that day!

How we built it

This project could not have been done without the map code we used from Georgy Potapov that implemented OpenWeatherMaps API and OpenStreetMaps so people can view different weather data from any location they want in real time! The link to his work is here. Next I would also like to give a shout out to Grzegorz Tomicki who was the guide that led us to the Github repo from Georgy Potapov. His work on Leaflet that we learned from can also be found here. Finally for our map of the states, we used work from dmarcs on Github. The repo for his work on the interactive state map with data about each state can be found here. The rest of the time allocated was spent to designing, tweaking, and implementing these technologies to suit our project's needs. We used the Bulma CSS framework to quickly deploy a responsive and aesthetic website without lots of time being spent on CSS.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of time was spent debugging and implementing the maps and other work we found on Github with our own as it wasn't always plug and play. On top of this we wanted the work to better suit us so we made tweaks as well from our sources. The other major time crunch was determining how we wanted the site to truly function on the fly so times of quick pivoting were a struggle when we wanted to change course.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe we built a beautiful and helpful website in a very short amount of time. We are proud of the technologies we learned, the constant small hurdles we had the fortitude to overcome, and being able to come together as a team and bond in this shared experience.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development over the past two days. There are a lot of technologies available to implement. We wanted to be able to deploy and make something quickly, so although we didn't use anything truly "fancy" we still learned a lot about the following: development, web site hosting, implementation of other code and projects, team management, and role delegation. This project helped to deepen our understanding of what it takes to build an interactive website from scratch.

What's next for The Greenhorn’s Guide to the Garden

In the future, or if we had more time, we would like to work on making the site have a better flow and feel. Currently the site, while it looks pretty good to say the least, doesn't have the most intuitive UI, and a major concern we had was usability. Also we would have liked to add a way to manage and keep track of a garden. This way you could know what was growing where, for how long, and any other special information.