HikeGest | Devpost

Homepage of HikeGest
Individual hiking trail

Inspiration

HikeGest is the website avid hikers need. Our name is combined from "Hike" and "Suggest", which is targeted to hikers who cannot decide where their next trail will be.

What it does

It suggest hiking trails nearby the user based on online user ratings and weather conditions for the next 5 days. It returns the top 5 trails that the hiker should consider. We want to implement a recommending system which will pick which day has the best weather for the hike, but we lack the time.

How I built it

We used this weather api and this hiking trail api to get data. We first get the user's current coordinates and pass it to the hiking trail api. It returns a list of hiking trails, and we pass each hiking trail's latitude and longitude to the weather api. After the process, we get all the weather information of each trail. We store the hiking trail and weather data in Google Firestore to enhance performance. We used React for frontend and Node.js for backend.

Challenges I ran into

We got the idea pretty quickly, but we spent some time discussing how to structure the project. One of our biggest challenges is getting everyone able to run the website locally. Since we can only communicate through the Internet, we cannot immediately look at each other's computer screen and help debug. So it takes us more time to communicate and figure out issues over Discord.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very happy that we can combine the two unrelated apis together and leverage them for our project. Utilising Firestore also improves the website's performance.