rescue-me

When Hurricane Harvey landed in Houston, many people became trapped by swiftly rising waters. Typical emergency methods like calling 911 couldn't save everyone at once, so some turned to social media to request rescue from the general public. We saw a need to organize these volunteer rescue efforts into a simple, concise app that would allow rescuees to easily input important information and rescuers to efficiently locate those in need of help. Our web app is geared toward a mobile platform and collects rescue requests into a database which rescuers can then access. Based on their location, rescuers receive a list of nearby requests along with details about the people and/or pets in need, which they can accept or decline.

We built the front end of the web app using HTML and JavaScript with Bootstrap to handle the styling and some elements. We used Node.js/Express for the web server and Postgres for the database. The web app is hosted on Oracle Cloud.

We ran into a lot of difficulty with the requests to the database. Two of our trio were inexperienced with Ajax, but with enough persistence we overcame the issues as they appeared, from incorrectly formatting the JSON data to mysteriously generic errors.

We are very proud of our final product. We joked about actually finishing something at a hackathon since we accomplished most of our goals and built a working application, but of course there is always room for improvement. Our focus was almost solely on the mobile version of our web app, so the desktop version is lacking to say the least and would definitely be the next step. Given more time we would have fixed both, but 24 hours is a short time at a hackathon and we had to prioritize.

We met at lunch on Saturday right before coding began, and formed a group somewhat last minute with only a vague idea of a project, so it's great to look back and see how much we've accomplished as a team during CodeRED.

URL: https://129.158.99.90/

Built With

• bootstrap
• express.js
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• oracle-cloud