ParkingOps

Where do you want to park? We can help you find cheap parking lots near your destination!

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Inspiration

  • To brainstorm ideas, our team discussed what we hated the most about driving and a major complaint was parking. Our team is from San Francisco, so we all knew the absolute pain it is to find any parking. So, we decided on a project that would assist us in finding a parking space.

What it does

  • Our project calculates the best possible route to your destination like any normal navigation app, but the difference is that it also displays all available parking locations in a user-defined radius around it. Rates and addresses for the parking are given so that users can choose the perfect parking space for them!

How we built it

  • We began by creating a GitHub repository where we all made branches from. We would code separate parts of the project, and when we were ready, we all merged the code together.
  • We used the Inrix APIs to gather parking information in a specific radius around the target destination. Once we had this, we could display it on our website in a clean and readable format.

Challenges we ran into

  • We didn't know each other prior to the Hackathon, so we weren't sure what we were capable of.
  • Two of our members were very experienced in Python, but the other member of our team had zero experience in Python. Getting him used to the syntax of Python took a bit, but we pulled it off.
  • We had some issues formatting our website, one of our members on the team had no experience in HTML so we were not as efficient

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Despite not knowing each other before the Hackathon, we all worked extremely well as a team. We collaborated on code, shared ideas, and worked efficiently on our project.
  • This being our first hackathon, we're very proud of the progress we made. Being able to work with an industry-standard API to make something that has real-life application was a very cool change of pace for us.

What we learned

  • This hackathon has been eye-opening for all of us. We learned so much about the real-life application for the things we had been discussing in class, specifically APIs.
  • We all gained experience in hackathons and we're all excited to participate in more!

What's next for ParkingOps

  • While this was a super cool project to work on, we learned after that it has already been made before (by the company sponsoring this hackathon no less). But that doesn't mean we don't plan on working with each other in the future! We all got along very well so maybe we will work on a different project together.
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