weather2meet

Inspiration

We all love the days where the meetup with friends and family to have fun. Rain or shine right? Think again. Rain - the one thing that is responsible for ruining the fun. The expected warm, sunny and cloudless days at the beach, park, city or countryside has now turned into an appalling wet weather disaster. Things get wet...ugh. Who wants to be outside during that? Know in advance with ✨weather2meet✨.

What it does

Our web application takes user input which city in the world they want to arrive at on a certain date and time. By communicating with a weather api to extract future weather forecast for the given location on the date, the user can be briefed onto which times should be avoided (i.e. rain 😱 ⛈️)

How we built it

The frontend primarily revolves around ReactJS & TailwindCSS bundled by Vite. On the other hand, the backend of the web app uses ExpressJS, NodeJS communicated with the open source weather API from Open Weather. The initial design was drafted onto figma which is accessible here: Figma Prototype

Challenges we ran into

The weather api was initially difficult to work around due to the limitations of the "freemium" it offers. Also, the backend was initially difficult to setup due to the inconsistencies between WSL and windows powershell. Towards the end, one of the major roadblocks was linking the backend to the frontend to display fetched data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got it working! (ish hehe 😳)

What we learned

Basic ideas can be much more difficult to implement. Also realised that Hackathons are conducive for learning more about coding outside the classroom and the many possibilities a project can have. 🤩

What's next for weather2meet

Implementing a backend algorithm to rank the user's choice of time and date as well as given suggestions for better times to hangout depending on the weather at the given location.