Weather Alert

Inspiration

Our team was inspired by the idea of removing one piece of uncertainty out of people's everyday lives, the weather. By helping overcome this hurdle, we hope to inspire people to become "unstuck" by tackling the outdoors in the right gear, for the right weather, while maintaining safe social distancing.

What it does

The merchandising tool we built allows customers from across the globe to come in, punch in their zipcode and see the upcoming forecast for the next few days. That is not all. Our backend logic will also surface up related products to the forecast. This way, our shoppers can plan accordingly and not get caught out by bad weather. We hope that our merchandising tool will help people get out there and start feeling unstuck!

How we built it

We chose BigCommerce, a powerful open SaaS platform to power our catalog and ecommerce engine, and used it in a headless capacity by pairing it with Vercel's next.js headless storefront. This provides our customers with the best of both worlds. A quick responsive cart and shopping experience, tied to a flexible frontend that is capable of building a unique and custom UX/UI experience.

Powering the logic behind our merchandising tool we have, a serverless function running off AWS written in node.js . When a user submits their zipcode, the zipcode is sent to a lambda function via API gateway. The lambda function is a microservice that looks up the 7 day forecast from OpenWeather APIs. It then looks for patterns in the forecast and uses that information to fetch 7 relevant products. Once the forecast has been tied to products, the function will return the list and present to the customer.

Challenges we ran into

Working with typescript in a hackathon settings caused extra challenges Learning new frameworks while working full-time Having multiple people make commits back to back while getting reacquainted to the git flow Team members in different time zones with unique schedules