Inspiration
The inspiration for this project came to me a few years ago. When i was younger, I was very interested in the weirder things of life, interesting fun facts, and facts of society. During one of my ventures in the weird facts of the government, I found The Waffle House Index. It was an unofficial index used by FEMA in order to rate the amount of distress of an area. according to them, code green meant that an area was working as usual. code yellow meant that the area was put under a reduced menu, which meant the area might not have things like running water, electricity, or other conditions that might be hazards to the area. But code red. code red meant that the Waffle House was closed. Waffle House never closes, and if Waffle House is closed, the area must be in immediate or near danger. examples of this are in the panhandle of Florida during Hurricane Milton, as seen from this news article link. I saw this Hackathon, and my first thought was, "How do i challenge myself, what am i interested in," and within 10 minutes I had thought of this and was brainstorming ideas on how this could work.
What it does
This is a live map showcasing the Waffle House Index. This means that if a dot is green, the location is open. yellow currently showcases Waffle House's that are temporarily closed, due to reservations or otherwise. But red dots means a location is closed. when you have more than one red dot in an area, you know you have a major issue, which you can then plan accordingly. It's also just really cool to visualize data like this, and i think the next large disaster we have, we could view the changes on this map.
How I built it
I built this starting by figuring out the UI, what Library would allow me to use a map without a key (Thanks Leaflet), how to create a CSV file that is readable by JavaScript, and how to make the CSV file (using Python), specifically how to find the information of what stores are open and which are closed, which ended up being easier than i thought.
Challenges I ran into
Some Challenges i ran into are The first thing i tried to do was contact the Waffle House Team directly, but that ended up failing with no response from them. I manually searched through their codebase and website and found a section of code of which lists every single location and its status. i had to learn how to use new library's, figure out the best way to update my list, among other things.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that I got this far and actually am submitting my own idea to something like this. This is a topic I've always been interested in, and now I've created to my knowledge the only similar project to this. I'm proud that i was able to pull through the issues and create something I'm proud of.
What's next for the Waffle House Index Map
Next For this Map is allowing users to figure out exactly why a location might be closed, maybe a hurricane or something.
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