Pick Up

Inspiration

As a YouTuber and online reseller, I find myself posting multiple listings on local marketplace sites such as Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. With well over 1000 crimes associated with these meetups, I wanted a way to facilitate a safer way to complete these transactions while also keeping a record of transaction data to further fight against fraud and mal-intent

What it does

This application will allow for users to register and create in person meetups with each other while giving them the peace of mind to know when the user has arrived or that if anything happens, emergency contacts will be alerted.

How I built it

For the front end web framework, I used Nuxt/Vue for easy component creation. The APIs utilized were Radar.io, DataStax, and Google Cloud Services. Radar.io was used to calculate current location, auto complete destinations, and to calculate distance between two points to tell arrival time based on geo fencing. To stick with the same programming language, Express was used for the backend. The backend handled the get and post requests which was then passed off to the DataStax (noSQL database) API. This allowed for the storage of user information, meetup history, profile pictures, and the potential to extrapolate trends from the data collected to better optimize Radar.io. Google cloud services allowed for data redundancy and a place to save profile picture BLOBs. Google cloud services also offers a helpful location search API.

Challenges I ran into

Since I did not want to spend money on this project, I could not fully utilize Radar.io or Google Cloud Services. More specifically, I could have implemented automatic location completion without a search button but I did not want to reach my request quota for the API too soon. Also as someone who works with Sql Server, it took a bit getting used to the slight syntactical nuances of the DataStax API.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud that I was able to complete my first hackathon and now have a better idea on how to succeed in these types of competitions for next time.

What I learned

I looked into a bunch of APIs and realized that only time and my imagination was the limit for this project. I got a better handle on web development through Vue as well as more experience integrating APIs into my project and more experience with database manipulation.

What's next for Pick Up

Implementing a Kubernetes or Docker container would be my next step. I want to do more data analysis to see suspicious trends as well as create more efficient algorithms for choosing locations and reducing server load by not requiring interval server refreshes (similar to a websocket).