Herd Harmony

Inspiration

Parker, our lead API dev, came up with the idea for our project after discussing it with his father, who has years of experience in the field of Agriculture.

What it does

Herd Harmony is a website that allows farms to manage their cattle herds. It will store all sorts of information on the cattle it provides, making it easier for the rancher to plan ahead, and can help with breeding!

How we built it

Our team began by splitting in half- one half went to work on the visual half- the frontend. This crew, composed of Jaimie and Cat, started by creating the entire frontend environment, as well as designed the site you see before your eyes! Meanwhile, Parker and Nate began to work on the backend. This included figuring out hosting, setting up a SQL server, creating a fully custom .NET API, and getting the front end hosted. All of this hosting is cloud based, as well.

Challenges we ran into

To start with the backend, Nate and Parker had zero experience with hosting anything. It was a huge challenge to even get the SQL server up and accessible to an editor, much less available to the API! That's not even mentioning that Nate has had ZERO C# experience when he walked into the competition. In addition to this, neither Parker or Nate knew how to set up the SSL certificate, which also caused a lot of problems. Luckily, one of our instructors, Prof. Foley, was very instrumental in this. On the front end, Cat struggled very intensely with setting up the react app. Even though she has an extensive amount of experience coding in a react environment, this was her first time setting one up. This experience has greatly helped her realize how much she relied on the infrastructure she was familiar with. This pushed her to make some of her own in her own way. She figured out a way to do the routing as a result!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As the team lead, I am incredibly proud of this team. Nate walked in with little to no experience on anything we have done this entire weekend, and has grown into our go-to backend developer. He's more familiar with the backend than I am, and taking control while I've moved to the front end! Jaimie has had zero experience with React, and she is now extremely comfortable with the environment. She even has cleaned up code I've written, and I'm very familiar with the syntax! Cat, while my equal in knowledge walking into the competition, has almost singlehandedly set up the front-end environment and it works very well. She even innovated on some of the solutions we are used to in the environment, to make the solution fit our needs. As for myself, I'm proud to be a member of this wonderful team. -Parker

What we learned

-How to set up a react app -How to set up a C# .Net Web API - how to set up a SQL database in the cloud - how to host a website - SSL certificates -Ajax Infrastructure -Hosting custom code in the cloud

What's next for Herd Harmony

After a few more coats of polish, one idea we initially cut was an EPD (Expected Progeny Development) calculator built right into the app. This would greatly help farmers control their herds, and let them select for certain traits they want to emphasize on their ranch!