Vaccine-Finder

65+ friendly vaccine finder intended to notify by email and/or text.

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Inspiration

We got our inspiration from Pat our teammate. Her parents were attempting to get a COVID vaccine appointment. It was difficult and required her help and still was not easily done. We decided to try to make this process more accessible to the elderly and people with disabilities.

What it does

The website takes a user's location, either zipcode or full address, user's email and/or phone number. The location is used to get the nearest sites. They are then put on a notify list and if the site has any availability, we would send out an email and/or text to the user.

How we built it

Front-End - Hthml, CSS, bootstrap, JavaScript. Back-End - Node.js, java, firebase(google) The front end was designed to be as user-friendly as possible; striving to comply with WCAG AAA rating. The website that the users information and stores it. The backend scraps the web routinely to check if sites are available. if yes, updates the user.

Challenges we ran into

We hadn't used many of these technologies before, and so, we ran into complications when working with them. We also needed to keep an eye on pay-as-you-go services that charge based on requests made, which gave us insight into how those considerations would impact applications in the real world.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of successfully web scraping with Selenium to get availability for vaccination appointments. We also learned a whole lot about technologies we didn't have experience with before - like Javascript, Node.js, Firebase, CSS and HTML. Geohashing was another interesting insight. We're proud that we strived to include elders and people with disabilities in our web design. As they are often forgotten when it comes to technologies.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to work together and modularize our efforts, especially when working with more than one person on a deadline. We learned a lot of Javascript and about how API request costs can affect app design. We also learned how much time and effort goes into completing an application.

What's next for Vaccine-Finder

As the cost is too high to maintain, sadly vaccine finder will be shutdown after judgement. However, a GitHub is planned with maybe revisions and completion of the project.

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