Waterfront

Flood
Ready for a flood
Redcross emergency response

Inspiration

We learned about the rising sea level and how it may affect the city of Boston in the future from the public data sets available on the Boston Data website. Our challenge was to educate citizens and provide them an interactive portal to better prepare for future circumstances.

What it does

Our web application educates users and alerts them if their home is susceptible to future flooding using an address-to-coordinate system.

How we built it

We built it using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. We used various technologies such as:

Fastify: a Node.js backend web framework.
Leaflet: a JavaScript framework for interactive maps
OpenCage: a public, free geocoder api for address-to-coordinate conversion
Mapbox: a live location platform for generating map data

We used Visual Studio Code Live Share extension to all collaborate on the same files at the same time. Everything was backed up periodically to GitHub too.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we explored linear algebra algorithms to determine if a given point was inside or outside of a polygon. We realized this was going to be too complex for us to solve as the GeoJSON Multipolygon format was difficult to understand. We opted to using the provided features of the mapping library Leaflet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Julia and Colin were first time web developers and learned so much and took total ownership of certain features across all three web programming languages. Ethan got to use Fastify for the simple static web server, an open source project he is a core maintainer of.