Chillspaces

Inspiration

In 2021, the CDC reported that 11.7% of U.S. adults regularly experienced worry, nervousness, or anxiety. As the COVID-19 lockdown closed, people had to re-adjust in returning to in-person interactions, which has induced a lot of stress.

The project started when one of our team members suggested a website to find quiet road trails to cycle in. After some discussion, we expanded it to include places where people can more generally relax. We discovered that our idea could help people de-stress by going to areas that could encourage them to unwind after a long day.

Using Inrix API, we could find routes for nearby places to save time in a person’s busy schedule and combine that with other external API information to determine the best places to chill.

What it does

A user starts by searching to get places to relax around a location. The website gathers input from filters to narrow down convenient and quiet, nearby areas. The front end will query Inrix API through a proxy from the back end, which also scores each place based on various criteria from the filters. When the user selects a place they want to visit, the location is highlighted and a route and more detail is shown.

How we built it

We’re excited to have created a large backend API proxy that handles all the queries the website application would want to request. The frontend was built using React.js, tailwind css, and leaflet to build a modern looking website. The backend was deployed to Heroku to make API endpoints and the frontend was deployed to GitHub pages.

Challenges we ran into

With only three members, our group had to stay on track and be organized to keep on schedule. We communicated with each other to set up a workflow and followed a timeline to take breaks and report progress. All of us had to learn and try out new things on the fly to keep up the pace: GitHub Desktop, Flask Blueprints, React, .gitignore files, etc.

On the technical side, we had to search for and manage many different external API calls to gather data from various places. Because of this, we also had to optimize the speed of the program, so that the proxy server’s response time wouldn’t be slowed down by too many calls. Additionally, to reduce costs, we focused on easy-to-use and free trial APIs.

None of us were very familiar with the frontend side of things, and it was the first time any of used the React framework. Linking the frontend with the backend was also a challenge, and it was insightful to plan out the project so that the process could run smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re excited to have created a large backend API proxy that handles all the queries the website application would want to request. Despite looking quite simple, there was a lot that went on behind the scenes. Addresses and locations needed to be parsed and converted into longitude/latitude coordinates. Several different APIs needed to be queried to decide on what what locations fit our criteria. Finally, I think we definitely made it all look easy in the front end.

What we learned

All of us had to learn and try out new things on the fly to keep up the pace. We stayed on top of project file management with GitHub Desktop. The backend side learned about Flask Blueprints, .gitignore files, and making API calls with requests library. The front end learned about React and many other libraries.

What's next for Chillspaces

We see that there are still ways for us to expand the website. For example, features such as a resource page or a login to save favorite places could be added. On the software side, we could create a database to store and cache some of the data, sanitize user input, and make a safer way to store API keys. Finally, we would like to create a mobile-friendly version of the website to make it more widely accessible. In addition, we would like to add a visualization of the shortest route between locations.