The Air-Quality-Alert.net Story

Air-Quality-Alert is a website where visitors can go to check the Air Quality of different locations around the world. Visitors can also sign up to receive text or email alerts when the Air Quality in their area reaches the Good, Moderate, Unhealthy For Sensitive Groups, Unhealthy, Very Unhealthy, or Hazardous designations set by the EPA.

Link to Air-Quality-Alert.net HD Demo Video on YouTube

This project was inspired by the recent forest fires in the British Columbia region of Canada which caused smokey and smoggy conditions throughout the Pacific NW. These conditions persisted for more than a week impacting both healthy individuals and sensitive groups. It took several days of smokey and hazy conditions before the true cause, and appropriate response for these conditions, was disseminated throughout the population.

During this time many people engaged in activities which put them at risk because a lack of awareness. In the future Air-Quality-Alert will allow individuals, particularly sensitive populations, to be alerted as soon as conditions in their area are harmful so they can take appropriate measures to protect the health of themselves and their loved ones.

Built With

Ruby on Rails, Javascript, JQuery, Twilio for SMS, and T.D.D. with RSpec/Capybara

Process

I used an agile, test-driven, approach to development while working on this application. This process sped up development, allowed me to confirm functions of the application performed as expected, and allowed me to develop from a users perspective.

Below are the mockups I made in Sketch before beginning development, I think I delivered a close match to what I initially envisioned.

What I learned

Here are a few of the technical and personal lessons I learned while working on this project:

• API's can be faulty and go down unexpectedly, if it is critical that a part of an application works use MULTIPLE back up API's and have error handling built into the application so when API's fail your application doesn't.
• Testing Javascript with Capybara can fail for ALOT of different reasons (also tests that previously worked can suddenly start failing). Not sure how to mitigate this problem besides devoting a period of study to understand these problems on a deeper level so I'm prepared when they arise.
• This project reiterated for me that, while I enjoy design and a clean UI, I don't want to be a front end developer. For future projects I'll use bootstrap or another simple framework so I can focus the vast majority of my efforts on server side programming.
• Bite the bullet and do things right the first time. I placed one of my methods in the controller which I knew didn't belong there (knowing I would come back and refactor it out later) because it sped up development on a feature I was working on. This decision ended up costing me more time because when I came back to refactor I had to re-understand that piece of code.
• Invest more time picking what I want to build. I really enjoyed working on this app because of the social good it can do, but wish I put more time into developing an idea that A) I want to invest in for the longterm, B) Can have a BIGGER impact on peoples lives, and C) presents harder technical challenges.

How To Run

Download application from github

$ git clone https://github.com/jbkimble/air-quality-alert.git

$ cd air-quality-alert

$ bundle install

create, migrate, and seed the database

$ rake db:create

$ rake db:migrate

$ rake db:seed

Run Tests

$ rspec

Start server

$ rails s

application will now be available at localhost:3000 or your default port