Inspiration
Our inspiration for Sustainable Hacks came from our observations about the world's environmental practices. We realized that if there was a place for everyone to share the ways that they reduced, reused and recycled, that there would be more people engaged in these practices, thus cutting down on all of our carbon footprints.
What it does
This website functions as a blog that everyone can contribute to. Everyone who visits our website can make blog posts about their practices, and in return, they can also view others' blog posts. Through this cycle of contribution, everyone learns more about environmental sustainability.
How we built it
When we started designing Sustainable Hacks, we first looked for a template on bootstrap to use as the base theme for our website. After we copied these files into our GitHub repository, we then split up the work, with Aaron and Tahj focusing on the front-end work, and Jason and Jonathan focusing on the back-end work. On the front-end, Aaron and Tahj continued to make edits to the bootstrap template by updating the CSS styling and adding pictures, as well as also adding more pages to the website and maintaining our brand consistency. On the back-end, Jonathan explored Firebase and implemented it as our way to host the website, as well as manage the accounts. Meanwhile, Jason explored Flask and worked on implementing it as the server for our blog pages.
Challenges we ran into
As we designed this project, there were multiple challenges we ran into. For example, we initially struggled to integrate the Firebase Authentication system for managing all of our accounts. We chose to use Firebase Auth because of its native features, which ideally would have cut down on the amount of coding necessary by the back-end team. Eventually, we figured out how to integrate it successfully with our pages, but that was not the only challenge we faced. We also struggled to design our Python script for the blog posts. Originally, we started working in Django, but switched to Flask when we could not easily and reliably run our code. From there, we were able to deploy the Flask server locally, but struggled to have the Firebase Hosting page run the Flask server. On the Front-end, we struggled to maintain our brand consistency throughout each individual html file. This comes from our lack of experience with web development, which gave us a large learning curve to overcome.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
For us, this was the first time we deployed an actual website to the World Wide Web. Given the long process of template reconfiguration, page linking, and server integration we faced to get to this point, we're proud of ourselves for getting to the point where we have a product to show off. Especially when we remember that 24 hours ago, most of us had never even developed a website from a bootstrap template before.
What we learned
For many of us, this was a bit of a crash course on Git and GitHub. Despite our relative unfamiliarity with the version control software, we all adapted so we could safely and securely save all of our progress. We also learned how to develop a Flask server, integrate Firebase Authentication into a web app, and deploy a website to a Firebase-hosted page.
What's next for Sustainable Hacks
In the future, we plan on continuing to expand our blog functionality. We plan on promoting our blog, first through the Clemson community, and then through our hometowns. Our goal is to get people from all over the United States promoting environmental sustainability, and this hackathon is just the beginning of our journey!
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