Wahi [HAAC]
Hawaii is the home to several endangered animals, such as the sea turtle. With visitors from around the world on our island, there are times when these animals get caught up in some misfortunes. For this year’s Hawaii Annual Code Challenge, known commonly as HAAC, the Hawaii Marine Animal Response (HMAR) asked for hackathon participants to design an application that would allow members of the public to report animal sightings as well as animals in distress.
Contributions
My contribution to the project was primarily working on some of the API integrations that our application intended to use. One of these is the Google Maps JavaScript API, which we planned on using together with the user’s location in order to pinpoint their location name. This is since visitors from the mainland are usually not aware with specific location names, so using the reverse geocoder from Google would help eliminate the hassle of finding the location name. My other contribution was integrating the Cloudinary API with our application to store user-uploaded images to the cloud. Then the link would be stored in our database, similar to what was done for the COVID tracker application.
Video Demo
Screenshots
Export Page
The export page to be used by the HMAR staff for reports.
Landing Page
The main landing page for the Wahi application.
Map View Page
The map view page for the Wahi application.
List View
Lists the latest reports, all in one place.
The Experience
This was the second hackathon I participated in my college career, however it was my very first HACC! The hackathon lasted for a few weeks, so we had more time to work on the app compared to the Meteor Hackathon, yet it was still an enlightening experience. There were quite a lot of obstacles I faced during this hackathon, but the greatest challenge was working with handling the data we recieved from the API calls. We used axios for making the GET requests, and I had a very difficult time wrapping my head around the whole concept of async/await when dealing with promises. This took a great deal of time, and unfortunately I was not able to accomplish the intended behavior by the judging day. Ideally, we would've liked to pass in the coordinates of a user's location (latitude, longitude) in the query and then get back the name of the location, which would then be stored in the database. However, I struggled with handling the data we recieved in the response from the server then storing that string containing the location name in the database. Due to the nature of promises, I basically realized I was trying to do something that was not possible.
Soft skills are also another skill that I was able to work on as a result of this hackathon. I would say it's pretty rare for me to participate in events like these where I have to program with others on an app, and communication is crucial to these kind of projects. Alyssia leading the team really helped keep all of us on track and I realized just how important it is to give updates, even if they're just a single sentence. One change can make such a huge difference.