PotholeMap

Inspiration

All around New York there are persistent potholes that creates disruption and a lot of damage to vehicles. We saw a lot of videos online of busses and cars having to go through potholes and taking wide-turns into roads to avoid them. We wanted to create a system to allow transportation authorities to get fast data to act quickly before it causes even more damage.

What it does

Our app allows the user to submit reports of potholes all across NYC. The workflow is essentially a person sees a pothole, then they can come onto our website to report it. We take a description, location, and image data to verify the validity of the pothole. Then we store this information on our database to hopefully give to the proper authorities to let them act quicker and stop further damage.

How we built it

Our tech stack consisted of NextJS/ReactJS for the frontend, fastAPI for the backend server, and sqlite for our database. We split up roles within our team of five with two dedicated frontend developers and three backend developers that worked on this project.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of merge conflicts and challenges with UI. A lot of us have never worked on a team based software project before where we had to communicate between each other constantly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We went out of our comfort zone. A lot of us never worked in NextJS/ReactJS, but we took a real challenge to learn the tools and also create a real working project that can impact urban life in NYC in just 24 hours.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how we work in a team based setting for software. Throughout the 24 hours we dealt with design issues, coding issues, and we even pivoted from a chrome extension to a full stack web app. We are proud of what we were able to build in 24 hours.

What's next for PotholeMap

We probably want to create a dashboard to allow the department of transportation to access the data quickly. Also, design the app to scale to a lot more users and use a queue to handle a lot more requests.