Team Slack Handles:
[Hacker] Alexis Phan:U032PDBE4HE [Hacker] Jason Gao: U031WRF68DT [Hacker] Lucy Ying: U031T3HB59U [Hacker] Tristen Li: U031T0EKJ22 [Hacker] David Liu: U03222QQZQU
Inspiration
We were inspired by HackBeanpot 2022's Space Theme and decided to go with a product that was space related. A few days ago we looked into the Boston night sky talking about how little stars there were due to light pollution. Remembering back to that conversation we decided to make a website that allows people to find the best star-viewing locations near them so that we may continue to enjoy this relaxing hobby.
What it does
Project ClearSkyes is a forum for stargazers. It allows users to post places that have a good view of the stars. They can create star sites by giving them a name, entering in their address, then writing a description about the site. If users enter in an address that is already stored in the database, they will update the description of the site to include the new user’s description as well. Users can also filter these posts to order the sites by distance by entering in their address.
How we built it
We used HTML and CSS to create the UI for our website, Django to help with inputting reports into our mySQL database.
Challenges we ran into
Due to the limited amount of time, we had to scrap a lot of ideas. We initially wanted to base good viewing sites off of the amount of light pollution in the area using a light pollution map. Given more time to implement and learn new materials, we would definitely attempt adding this feature. We also had difficulty with hosting our website remotely using Heroku as we ran into countless bugs where our Procfile was not recognizing the project as a web process. After hours of debugging, we fixed our file directory so all dependencies could be resolved. However, we came upon a new issue where Heroku could not recognize our database
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We started off implementing our knowledge from our Object-Oriented Design class and our Database Design class to plan out our process and product design. We then all learned HTML and CSS to create the visuals and functionality for our website.
What we learned
We used a Google Maps API to find locations and to do a distance matrix so that we could order our queries by search distance. We also learned Django how to connect back-end functionalities with user interface on the front end and helped us create database objects. It also helped speed up the progress with the project with its built-in functionalities.
What's next for Project Skyes
We would implement the functionality that we had initially planned to do but decided to cut due to time. We had wanted login options to record people’s favorite locations and as an extra measure against possible spammers. We also want to make the user interface better and more complex after learning React.
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