Vanguard

Confidence in Safety.

Vanguard In Action

Retrieve local crime score, and scores of neighboring areas.

Vanguard in Action

Meet the team! 😊 They also each gave a quote just for this bio.

Amanuel Awoke (Top left)

"It's hard being famous."

Rajashow Parajuli (Bottom Left)

"Oh my god why is this not working."

Ferzam Mohammad (Top Right)

"It's nerf, or nothing."

Vyoma Jani (Bottom Right)

"Give you a what?"

Real Film of Early User Tests

Inspiration

One of our members was investigating the crime ratings in Baltimore as they were moving there for a job. While researching neighborhood safety, he found that stereotypes about Baltimore being a dangerous area were not usually true and often misleading.

What it does

Vanguard is a user safety app that provides the local crime rating of the user's current location, and then notifies the user and trusted related users of their crime rating and location. This is compared to the national average, where the average is 100.

How we built it

Using react native so that the product can be shipped to iOS and Android, we utilized Courier API for notifying users, the Google Maps API, and the Attom API for crime data.

Challenges we ran into

Getting setup with different tools like Expo took a while, and new tools like Courier had a slight learning curve as well. School/other time commitments did take away time from working this weekend, but we all still learned and enjoyed working on the project. The usage of REST APIs is a very valuable skill which we learned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the various APIs to work together was cool. A couple of us were new to working with different third-party tools, and while there were learning curves, it was satisfying to see the functionality succeed in the end.

What we learned

We were all new to React Native and app development

What's next for Vanguard

Currently Courier is a very practical API which we did not get to fully flesh out. Adding push notifications and scanning Census Places (rather than Zip Codes) for crime must be implemented.

Built With

Submitted to

Bitcamp 2021

Created by

I worked on setting up Courier so that it would send notifications via SMS whenever the app met certain conditions. Getting used to the various services involved in doing this took a little getting used to, but found their API to be easy to use after spending time with it.

Private user
I worked on the front-end of the application using React Native on Expo Go. It was my first time using these frameworks and even trying front-end development in general, so while there was a learning curve, I was able to gain a lot of understanding.

Vyoma Jani
UI/UX design.
API and data processing design.
Documentation.
Vibe enforcer.

Amanuel Awoke
Computer Science Senior at University of Maryland College Park
Private user