Where Should I Live?
It Begins
In the Lambda School endorsement process, Labs is where it all comes together and is the final phase before graduating and beginning the job hunt. I was assigned to a team of 8 consisting of fellow web developers and data scientists. None of us had ever met or worked together before. Additionally, we had a Project Lead and a Stakeholder who were both Lambda Staff.
It all began with the problem we were given to solve: how can I get relevant information in an easy to access form about cities I am interested in moving to?
Luckily we didn’t have to totally start from scratch. We were given the beginnings of a web project called Cityspire to which we would be adding and upgrading.
Still, the task was formidable. We would have to all work together to create a working web app that the stakeholder would approve. And, for many of us web developers it was the first time working with data science on a project.
We began by planning the overall architecture. This was a high level view of the project to get us thinking about how to approach the project. It was a living document and would guide us throughout the process.
Working Through The Technical Challenges
Our app was to have several features. A user would be able to search for a city and get relevant information returned — walkability score, population, pollution score, livability index, and crime statistics. The user would be able to save their favorite city searches to a personal “dashboard.”
Users would be authenticated using Okta authentication. This simplified the login process by using a service to handle the token, but was something none of the web team had used before which was a challenge at first. But after some researching and tinkering we were able to get it working.
The data science team would be responsible for generating the city data and feeding it to the web development team. Through means of an API, the web team would pull the data into a PostgreSQL database in the back end and make it available to the front end through another API request.
Current State of the App
Today, the app works and has shipped with the following features:
- Okta Login
- User Profiles
- User Dashboard
- City Search
- Livability Score
- Walkability Score
- Crime Rate
- Air Quality Index
- Rental Rate
- Diversity Index
Future Updates and Reflections
For future updates, we would like to see some visualizations of the data using various graphing technology. Because, words are boring. This will present a technical challenge though in learning how to use the graphing framework, and deciding which one is most appropriate.
Also, it would be nice to get an additional data set, that being population projection of the searched city.
Looking back on this project, it was a great introduction into how to plan a project and work together on a team to complete an application. Going forward, this was an invaluable experience and relates directly to my career goals of working on a software development team.
