Wander

Inspiration

When I got to this event, one of the first questions I asked was "Where can I find a restroom?". Why? Because we're in this weird middle ground where no one wants to shove a paper brochure into their pocket, and they definitely don't want to go searching through a company's website to download a static pdf of the same brochure. What I wanted, and what I believe everyone wants. Is an app that handles all this for you. The event creators can map out the event ahead of time or event attendees can map out the event as they go, helping out other attendees and quickly mapping out the event for everyone.

What it does

Wander finds your location and determines the event that you're currently at. Wander then shows a map with color-coded markers that represent object and events taking place. If a user finds something they would like to add to the map, Wander gives event creators and event attendees the ability to place markers on the map and describe what is there for everyone else and how long it will be there.

How its Made

I created an Angular frontend connected to an AWS API Gateway that routes to a set of serverless CRUD functions written in Python. These update the data for the different events and the markers for those events in their respective tables in DyanmoDB.

Major Challenge

I first attempted to write Wander as a react-native mobile app instead of an Angular app but the react-native-maps library is still a work in progress and had bugs I could not overcome, especially with the lack of documentation.

Learning Opportunity

Learning how to write a FaaS project and what that means for the rest of the project took a lot of effort. I had also never worked with the Google Maps API and learning how to work with it was very interesting.

What's next for Wander

My next plans are to improve the scheduling system for events so that they can be easily planned and to extend Wander to mobile in order to better serve my target market of active event goers along with the event hosts.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• angular.js
• aws-dynamodb
• aws-lambda
• google-maps
• python
• serverless