Experience Level
This is my first time ever hacking at a hackathon, and I had a blast! I learned a lot and met a lot of cool people.
Inspiration
Living in NYC, one of the fastest thriving cities in the world is amazing. However, the worst part about being in the middle of the city is when you have to use the bathroom really badly, but you don't know where the nearest public restroom is. PottyNYC tracks the location of the user and finds the nearest bathroom to you, and gives you directions to the bathroom.
What it does
PottyNYC is a web and mobile application that allows users to find public restrooms in NYC in real-time.
PottyNYC tracks the location of the user and finds the nearest bathroom to you, and gives you directions to the bathroom. It relies on NYC Public Restroom data as well as public user data to help you find the closest and most sanitary public restrooms in NYC.
How we built it
We built this web application using HTML, CSS, Material-UI, JavaScript, Python, and the Google Maps API.
Challenges we ran into
Our team ran into many challenges over the course of these couple of days. Both technically and mentally.
One of the first challenges include configuring the Google Maps API. All of our team members are new to the Google Cloud Platform, so setting up the Google Maps API was something new for us. We had to carefully follow Google's documentation and tutorial in order to implement Google Maps on our website. We also ran into the struggle of accidentally bleeding our API key on GitHub. We stressed so much trying to remove that commit history from GitHub and attempting to hide our key in variables, only to realize hours later, after extensive research, that hiding our API was not necessary for the client-side. Another challenge faced on the front-end side was trying to implement, flexboxes, wrappers, and popups. There were a lot of complications on how to make the website zoom and mobile-friendly, and more issues arose when we saw that overlaps were not cooperating. There was also the challenge faced where a teammate was busy and so they merged their own pull request, so once the application was deployed, nothing looked correct. It was also hard to parse through all of the data due to the rate limit.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were proud that we were able to successfully place Google Maps on our website, and that we were able to find the public restroom in NYC data and parse it.
What we learned
This is my first time building a full-stack web application from scratch, so this experience was exhilarating. I learned a lot throughout my experience at this hackathon, mainly how to organize git branches and pull requests, and how to work with a team. Technologically, I learned how to successfully implement and use an API, as well as a lot of front-end development technologies such as HTML/CSS!
This is my first time hacking for a hackathon and I had a blast :)
What's next for PottyNYC
We would love to fix all the bugs in the app, touch up our minimal viable product and also add more features to the application, and finally, release the Web-Application and Mobile part in the future!
We would love to take this project further.
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