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dashboard pre-data ingest
Inspiration
Sacramento is a community that cares about one another. Houselessness is more visible than ever in downtown Sacramento, and we wanted to do something about it. People without shelter are vulnerable to the harsh weather, hunger, and poverty, and lack the safety that a roof provides them. A web app dashboard can help provide houseless folks with the info they need to plan shelter and food resources.
"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked, and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty" – Mother Teresa
What it does
Social Sac provides a dashboard that aggregates data concerning weather forecasts and alerts, warm shelter availability and helpful info, COVID-19 vaccine information, and foodbanks/community refrigerators. On the back end, the tool uses custom web scraping helpers and scheduled tasks to obtain the most up-to-date info on shelter availability and weather, and maintains a SQL database of the associated info.
How we built it
Social Sac is a Django (Python) web app that relies upon the Open Weather API, the Google Maps API, custom web scrapers and connectors built in Python to fetch data and maintain a dynamic dashboard.
The dashboard design is built on an AppSeed template utilizing Google Material Design libraries.
Challenges we ran into
- Normalizing scraped HTML content, and creating JSON
- Integrating Google Maps API in Django models
- Element design (none of us are designers, really)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Custom webscrapers and database connectors
- Custom Django database models
- Google Cloud Infrastructure
- Live website
What we learned
- Use free trials for a bit of a progress speed-boost
- Webscraping is fun
- Houselessness in Sacramento is a growing issue
What's next for Social Sac
- Network and rest!
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