Jeff's Slack Profile: swamphacks-vii.slack.com/team/U01KU2M0GBX Text rather than call with questions, please. I will be at work!
Inspiration
Our project is inspired by a common interest in traveling. The original concept was a little different than what we actually ended up with. We had wanted to use historical data to then predict several given cities in the world whose climate would be nearest a desired temperature on any given date. We thought this would be a beneficial tool to anyone planning a vacation, but not sure where to go. The user could enter the date range of their vacation and the desired temperature of their destination, and the app would spit out a table containing several potential destinations, with links to Google Maps included.
What it does
In practice, we were unable to fully realize our original idea due to several snags we hit along the way. They were not discouraging, however, and we definitely managed to pull of a solid proof of concept! In the app's current state, the user inputs a temperature and a single date and clicks search. The app then polls NOAA's Climate Data Online (CDO) dataset to determine what cities were nearest that temperature on that date, and formats them nicely onto a table.
How we built it
We built the backend using C#. It's a relatively simple program that execute a series of API calls to the NOAA CDO server and then selectively formats and spits out the data such that the angular.js based frontend can use it.
Challenges we ran into
Unfortunately, schedule constraints prevented us from having the full duration of SwampHacks available for working on this project. Between having to work and homework-assignment-happy professors, we just simply wouldn't have had time to pull off our original idea within the time we did have. The other massive technical setback came early Saturday morning, when NOAA's CDO server dropped, and has remained down since. While we are confident that our API calls were working beautifully before this happened, we were unable to save and/or set aside any of the data, and as a result our proof of concept is simply using dummy data.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Learning to use the CDO API while it was still up and running was quite interesting, as nothing seemed to be located where we expected. We are also all generally proud that we were able to complete as much as we were, given how much time we all lost to external forces over the course of this project.
What we learned
Obviously, we learned about using the NOAA API. For a few of us, we also gained a better knowledge of C# and the .NET framework.
What's next for WeatherOrNot
We all have pretty much already decided to continue working on this project going forward. We want to manage to at least finish our original project idea. We'd also like to add more details to the output, whether that means using a different dataset or further manipulating CDO.
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