Inspiration
Being new to LA, we were not sure of where the best places to eat and park where. It is also difficult to navigate different areas, and sometimes it's seems intimidating going an unfamiliar place. Our goal with BreakBarriersLA is to allow users to do diligent research of where to park, eat, and visit different locations in various cultural neighborhoods. Many of the neighborhoods are also very divided and hopefully knowing more about other's cultures through this app will help bring different culture together.
What it does
The app allows you to search different cultural neighborhoods in LA such as Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Olvera Street, and Koreatown. You can specify the search to look at specific areas of each neighborhood. In addition, you can translate any language to English, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, or Japanese in order to aid communication with others.
How we built it
We used Hasura.io and used a boiler plate for python flask to generate the back-end for our application. We used the Bootstrap Framework, HTML5, Javascript, and CSS3 to develop many of the front-end components. We used various Google Map APIs as well as the Google Language Translator API in our application.
Challenges we ran into
We never had experience using python flask, Hasura.IO, or any of the APIs. It was difficult to implement everything together. Collaboration through GitHub was a challenge, having multiple issues with Git pull and Git push. Lack of knowledge in front-end development limited the design capabilities. We also were not able to fully incorporate our plans of developing a Review and Comments section.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to learn many different APIs in a short amount of time, and being the first project we've ever worked on the team, we developed close relationships and learned a tremendous amount from each other.
What we learned
Learned amount many APIs, using boilerplates, and more about microservices.
What's next for BreakBarriersLA
Develop a more in depth front-end with a better user interface. Add database to the system and expand the user system to include additional functionalities which were mentioned before regarding user interaction and comments.
