BPWorks - Boston Public Works

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Slack names: Adam, John Sargent, Jin, Shrey Patel, leonid

Inspiration

There are times when public construction work in Boston causes road closures or sidewalk closures, making them potential chokepoints for traffic, source for annoying construction noise, or safety hazards.

What it does

BPWorks maps out the location of public utility works happening around the Boston area and provides a e-mail subscription service for users who signed up to receive daily updates on what constructions are happening around their immediate area.

How we built it

We fetched the data from a public database called "Public Works Active Work Zone" maintained by the The Department of Public Works' Construction Inspection Unit of Boston link, geocoded (got the longitude and latitude of the addresses) them using an open source API provided by Nominatim link , and mapped them onto a map using Mapbox Openstreetmap link. The backend is supported by the Django framework and the frontend is built using Django templates. The pictures used are also taken by our team.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many problems with managing environments in Django as we tried to balance what packages were installed. Vague error messages made it difficult to pinpoint the exact location of bugs. While coding with new technology was a challenge, we also spent a significant amount of time finding suitable APIs (like an email provider that suited our needs) and discussing logistics. At the end we were able to overcome these challenge and put together something awesome!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The backend and frontend are completely functional, non-hardcoded, and well-connected. Our project also uses a database that will be updated daily so the project has value in real-life usage. More than half of our team are hackathon first-timers too so we are very proud of what we have accomplished under 48 hours.

What we learned

We tinkered around the Django framework and interesting CSS styling techniques. This was also the first time we have intersected several different APIs together to create one unique product! Beyond just learning about the technicals we learned how to efficient work as a team through consistent communication, code reviews, and through the wonders of Git.

What's next for BPWorks

We are looking forward hosting our application on a remote server to provide our service to the greater Boston community. We have also considered contacting the Boston City Government's development team to work with them to have our app built into their website. We have also considered adding an option for people to subscribe to a text messaging system to receive the alerts in addition to the existing emailing system.