Purpose

Our team had a strong focus on data, so we need a project that made heavy use of the plethora of free API's and databases available. When discussing potential projects before the hackathon the idea of a Travel Index came up, and after exploring the US travel advisory and getting excited at the World Bank API we decided to focus on a travel advisory targeted at women.

Our beta code for the project - 'Wravel' was a brilliant combination of the words 'Women' and 'Travel'. This was eventually replaced by 'Wander Women' after feeding the project pitch to ChatGPT and asking it for ideas.

Sources

We pull data from reputable travel advisories and women’s rights organizations and databases across the world to determine if a potential location is safe. We also prototyped a functionality to scan for tweets originating from that country relating to Women's safety issues, and planned to use spaPY (a sentiment analysis library) to run an analysis on the results. Links to those sources are included on our webpage.

Tech Stack

Front End: Wix (JS) Back end: Google Cloud (Python)

We initially switched to Wix for our front end for easy rapid prototyping of our front end, but since this is primarily a data-focused project we wanted to make use of python's libraries and easy API interface. While it absolutely would have been easier to put the entire stack on Wix, its backend capabilities didn't meet our requirements.

Challenges

The main roadblocks of this product involved getting various parts of our tech stack to integrate with each other. Setting up our API with Google Cloud's serverless functions and allowing that to communicate with a Wix front-end was challenging, in order to get around the CORS limitation when interacting with external APIs (like ours) we had to set up some backend functionality in Wix to communicate to our GC function and then pipe that into the front end.

Additional challenges included one of our teammates not having access to a laptop and being forced to program on an IPad, and another member's apartment building catching fire during the hackathon. Despite our interesting circumstances we were able to make due with our situation and developed a product we can be proud of.

Built With

• google-cloud
• python
• twitter
• website