Inspiration
UC Berkeley students often received emails about crimes happening around the area. However, it is not very useful to know whether any dangerous incident happens near them or not, as well as whether they are at higher or lower risks in certain areas.
What it does
Thus, we developed this simple web app called Safe Route that displays crime information in the last three months around Berkeley city. The information is scraped from WarnMe emails sent to students. The app also allows users to report whether there is a dangerous incident near them. The new data would be visible to other users as well.
How we built it
We used React and Google Map API for the front end and Flask for the back end. Our backend code is responsible for scraping WarnMe emails and extracting the coordinate address of each email about crime. The data will then be used by our front end to render places where there are crimes. We also add a visualization effect to give users a sense of which region is high-risk.
Challenges we ran into
It was our first time attending a hackathon and building a full-stack app, so everything was challenging to some extent. React was more challenging as we just learned it when the Hackathon began. Programming the backend was also challenging in handling server errors. It took a lot of time to set our project up, fix bugs, and connect the front end with the back end. Also, due to the limited time and our unfamiliarity with the tech stack, we were not able to add more complicated features.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
However, we were proud that we overcame most of the challenges during the development of our project, which took us hours just to fix just a few lines of code. We are happy that we powered through two sleepless nights and came up with a product that met our expectations.
What we learned
We learned how to collaborate via GitHub. We also learned the basics of React, Flask, Google Map APIs, and full-stack development in general. These skills would help us build future applications more confidently.
What's next for Safe Route
We want to implement more sophisticated features such as allowing users to contact each other when they need a walking companion and real-time updates. We also plan to use MindsDB to predict the probability of catching a crime and give the user the safest route to their destination.
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