Background
This was the first hackathon and even though its not my best project, I still thought its interesting enough to put up. Maybe an excuse to re-visit the idea too in the future :)
Inspiration
Have you ever tried to park at any semi-popular event? The endless circling, the frustration of not finding a spot, and the exasperation of getting a parking ticket are all too familiar to city dwellers.
After brainstorming and discussing what we didn’t like, we realized there was a problem we all faced and thought we could tackle it together.
Source of Data
The government has a lot of open data and we thought we would start there. We found a dataset from the USGS Earth Explorer that is updated every 8 hours.
We also implemented a user reporting system to allow for more granular frequent updates to parking information that is seperate from satellites and act as another source of data.
Implementation
We used python because playing with datasets was easier using jupyter notebook. It lets you run some code, see the result, and repeat all the while keeping a trail of this, just like solving a problem in your notebook!
We decided that we would start with working on the Figma UI mockup and the backend in Python in parallel.
Before going straight into code, we drafted a quick flowchart:
For the UI, here are some of the mockups:
Business Potential
The first thing that comes to mind regarding commercial viability is the ability to collaborate with lot owners to provide more parking by paying them part of your small subscription cost.
Improvements
I would have a simple frontend even if we have a mockup, it is still better than a purely terminal based demo!
What I learned
This was my first hackathon and I learned a lot of basics!
- The imporance of communicating your idea clearly
- The judges were not all technical, so it was hard to understand from the terminal that most of the logic was implemented. A simpler front-end with less features would have brought us more points
- Setting deadlines
- If no deadlines for finishing things are set, people will continue to work on whatever they are working on, even though it would probably been a better idea to cut it short and go to the next step.
- For this, having someone act more of a Product Manager and manage scope is helpful
Links
For our hackathon submission: https://devpost.com/software/myspot
For source code: https://github.com/HikaruSadashi/MySpot/