Air pollution is a critical yet complicated issue facing the world. There are tremendous public health impacts, contributing to a variety of respiratory and cardiovascular problems. And it is really, really difficult to avoid air pollution when you are trapped in a place with it. Yet on the other hand, air pollution seems like a necessary cost for human society to have developed to this point. The industrial revolution set off a massive increase in air pollution, but also a technological boom that improved the lives of billions. For most of the developing world, air pollution also is a necessary cost in competing and catching up with the developed world.
Having lived for many years in Beijing, I saw first hand just how bad air pollution can get. There were days where you can hold your hand and not be able to see your fingers. Yet it also made me realize that the air pollution is not unpreventable. The combination of government policy and individual/corporate cooperation can produce a massive effect in just a short amount of time.
We hope that by providing more information on air pollution, we can illustrate to more people just serious of an issue that this is. At the same time, we want to provide people with hope that this is not an unsolvable issue. With enough collaboration, we can make sure that we have good weather everyday, everywhere.
Our program has two main features. First, our program provides individuals the opportunity to register on the website to receive text notifications about the air quality. Second, our program provides a dashboard that gives an intuitive and informative breakdown of air quality information from around the world. By inputting your zip code (or any zip code), the dashboard will give a detailed visual and numerical breakdown of the air quality, including highlighting different pollutants in the air, the concentration of the different pollutants, show the change in air quality over time, and show the air quality of your city compared to the world.
This is a full-stack production that used a variety of tools including JavaScript, Python, MangoDB, ThreeJs, ReactJs, NodeJs, OpenWeatherAPI, and more. With this being the first hackathon for two of the three team members, and the second hackathon for the third member, this project was very much a learn along the way and build what we can process. We came up with a list of features that we thought would be good to have and slowly tackled each task, eliminating the ones that was out of our scope of ability.
Wow, we had so, so many challenges. This was a very long (and fun) 36 hours. Off the top of my head, I had a lot of trouble deploying our website locally on my device. That made testing changes I made to the code really difficult (although we eventually fixed it!). Another one was where something in our code viewed another part of the code as hostile and prevented it from loading. We could not figure out what the conflict was but it worked itself out in the end. There were also smaller stuff like text colors being very uncooperative, finding relevant and useful information in the plethora of answers in stack overflow, finding unique solutions to creating visualizations when we are not familiar with all the prebuilt libraries and tools.
We deployed a working product! Although we did not finish everything we set off to do, we all gave it our best (there was not a lot of sleeping and a lot of googling how to fix errors, I did not expect to do so much reading in the past 36 hours). Despite being relatively unexperienced in hackathons and perhaps in the specific area we were coding in, we supported each other through the process and helped get through the errors. (I personally want to shout out my teammates for being so patient and helpful with me, an International Political Major who has little formal coding experience of this type of nature).
Google is a great tool. The amount of Google tabs I had open throughout this hackathon was astonishing. Organize, organize, organize!!! We ended up having so many lines of code that it's even hard for us to remember everything we wrote. Beyond this, I think that we also all got a lot more exposure to a variety of different tools and languages that we did not use as much previous.
Stay tuned!!! We had a lot of big plans for the website that we did not get to finish just yet and this is definitely something that we are interested in building out more. There are a lot of API calls that we still need to flush out too. Making the website more scalable is also another goal of ours, right now we are severely limited by how expensive some API calls/databases/other services can get, but it would definitely be really nice to be able to add more to the website! (And who knows, it may even become more than a website).