PomoMural

Screenshot of PomoMural app
QR code to PomoMural web app

Inspiration

Chicago has lots of public art pieces and one of our team members recently started practicing the Pomodoro schedule . We thought: wouldn't it be great if instead of scrolling on his phone during his Pomodoro break, he took a walk or bike ride to check out a public art piece or mural? We aspired to create (and successfully deployed!) the PomoMural web app so that anyone in Chicago can find murals close to them.

What it does

PomoMural recommends nearby murals based on the user's current location (or a specific location, if user specifies). It provides an address, name, artist, a preview photo of the mural, and a Google Maps directions URL for each nearby recommendation.

How we built it

We started with napkin drawings of the UI. We then built a proof of concept backend to make sure we could reliably fetch user's latitude/longitude and use it to query nearest neighbors in a database of locations. We then embarked on the painstaking process of turning our barebones proof of concept into a nice-looking UI using CSS and HTML. We also did a lot of data analysis to fetch the necessary metadata for all ~500 murals in the city of Chicago. We then integrated with other non-critical services, such as the service that gets current weather and the Google Maps interface.

Challenges we ran into

We're a bunch of backend devs who did a primarily front-end project. The largest challenge was figuring out how to center a div.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We centered that div.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the NiceGUI package. We think it's a great option for future/other hackathon web dev projects because it's so approachable. It's written and implemented in Python3, and provides full-stack functionality with powerful UI features and a Flask-like backend.