GrassRoutes

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  Image of our front-end

Inspiration

We took our inspiration from Countable, a platform for learning about congressional bills. Our goal was to bring political engagement into the 21st century with an easy, intuitive system for finding nearby political events.

What it does

GrassRoutes uses Node.js to build a database of political events via a REST API, and then curates that list for visitors based on their current city.

How we built it

We leveraged Node.js and MonogoDB to create our back-end, with a simple HTML/CSS bootstrap front-end. The second version includes this API and this front-end. Our original ASP.net version can be found here.

Challenges we ran into

Originally we had written the back-end in ASP.net, but only having one Windows laptop made collaborating very difficult if not outright impossible. With 12 hours left on the clock, we stayed up and redesigned the back-end completely.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly we're proud that we have anything to present at all. Creating an entire API and website in 12 hours after not having slept for 24 is an accomplishment in and of itself, and we couldn't be more proud. It was also Shawn's first hackathon, and he did an incredible job while learning a lot.

What we learned

Although we didn't end up presenting the ASP.net version, we learned a lot about it and SQL databases. We also learned about Git workflows in a team and how to handle merges, branches, and revisions. Markdown was new to some of the members on our team, as was Heroku and Node.

What's next for GrassRoutes

We'd like to add polish to the site, such as adding categories for events and the issues they seek to address. This would allow us to leverage user registration and tailor feeds to an individual's specific political views (like Flipboard) We'd also love to include information on how to contact relevant congressmen.

Built With

• asp.net
• axios
• c#
• css3
• express.js
• heroku
• html5
• javascript
• mongodb
• mongoose
• node.js