HOWL | Devpost

Inspiration

Although the UW alert system notifies students of imminent danger, the system still leaves much to be desired. As students at UW, safety has been an increasing concern, and we believe that improvements to the alert system could be made. Being relatively unfamiliar with the streets surrounding UW, we were always unsure about which specific areas to avoid when alerts go off. This observation became the launch pad for HOWL.

What it does

HOWL takes information from the UW alert system emails in order to add on additional information to alerts, specifically the location of a threat on an interactive map. We did this by scraping data from UW alert emails and processing the data to figure out the address in the alert. Next, we converted the address into longitude and latitude coordinates using an API followed by using a Google Maps API to create an interactive map with markers based on those coordinates.

How we built it

We divided the work where two people worked in back-end and two worked in front-end. We had members working on the development of a webpage using HTML, CSS, and Javascript while other members focused on integrating an interactive map with markers, scraping UW alert emails, and processing data.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge was full stack development, but every step ended up as a challenge as we ventured into unfamiliar territory. Processing through data to extract a street when there were constant variations in formatting, using APIs for the first time, and connecting everything together were examples problems that we encountered.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Cooperating as a team to achieve our final product. Every member played a vital part in the development process no matter their experience with coding. We were able to use several different APIs, familiarize ourselves with new languages, become comfortable with coding with the terminal and command prompt, and push ourselves beyond our comfort zone. Tangible accomplishments that we are proud of would include designing a clean webpage, creating an interactive map, and scraping data from Gmail.

What we learned

We basically learned everything from scratch as this was our first hackathon as first years. Scraping data from APIs, experimenting with setting up local web servers using Spring Boot, learning new languages, interacting with GitBash, handling Google Cloud APIs, and becoming more proficient with IDEs.

What's next for HOWL

Adding more features to our map such as finding the best path out of danger and giving tips to help stay safe and deal with trouble. Furthermore, we believe that it is possible to expand the scope of HOWL, servicing the entirety of Seattle and anywhere else.