At ConuHacks IV, Minnie, Julia, Zoé and I built a web app that is designed to reduce waste in the city.
Link to project here.
We're selfish millennials. We don't like to pay for washrooms, search for electronic drop-offs, or hold my trash and recycling for a long time. But, we also care about making the world a better place. That means no littering or throwing toxic batteries into regular trash bins. This web app helps you organize your life and be a better person, all while being convenient and easy to use
Here's our solution: a map that grabs your location data, and returns to you the nearest public washrooms and waste disposal bins. And it tells you the best walking route to get there. Never find yourself a desperate tourist in NYC without a washroom again!
We built the website with HTML and JavaScript, using the papa parse library to read the CSV data. The map display and distance tracking were implemented with the Google Maps API.
Dealing with asynchronous functions in JavaScript was a time and a half. We needed to explore setTimeout, callback functions, and promises in order to get our code to run in the order that we wanted. Although we eventually succeeded, the parsing of the CSV file takes longer than we'd like, and if a user tries to get data points before the parsing is done, the markers will not appear. Also, since were not located in New York City, we could not use the GPS localization functionality from the Google Maps API, so we generated random coordinated within New York City.