Like many people in the Pacific Northwest I love to go hiking and backpacking, which is great because there are so many wonderful places to explore in this area.
However, sometimes I find it hard to keep track of where I have been, and I find myself asking questions such as “What was the name of that hike I went on last July?”, or “Which hikes have I done on the Olympic Peninsula?”.
So, for my capstone project at Ada Developers Academy I built a web app called ScrappyHiker that allows users to keep track of all of the hikes they have been on, and any details about them that they don’t want to forget! In addition you can upload a GPX track for any hike that you have added to ScrappyHilker.
- Visual representation of your hiking history on a map
- Add a pin for a hike
- Upload a cover photo for a hike
- Upload a cover photo for a hike
Checkout the live site or video demo of ScrappyHiker!
- Google Maps API
- Google Maps Geocoding API
- Rails API backend
- React frontend
- S3 for photo uploads
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
React is a lot of fun! I really enjoyed the component structure of React and felt that it allowed for very clean frontend code.
It’s fun to learn something totally new independently! I really enjoyed learning react and how to interact with multiple Google Maps APIs on my own. My capstone project gave me a new sense of confidence that I am capable of quickly learning new technologies and applying them to a project I am working on.
It’s incredibly rewarding tp build something that solves a pain point in your own life. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to have the time to build something that solves an issue that I have in my day to day life. I know that this will be the first of many such projects that I build in my spare time.
It turns out a month wasn’t a lot of time to learn React and implement all the features I wanted in Scrappy hiker. As a result, there are a lot of features I envisioned in ScrappyHiker that I didn’t have time to implement. A few of them are:
Photo gallery: Each hike would have a photo gallery on it’s details page (as opposed to the ability to upload a single cover photo for each hike)
Search functionality: Ability to narrow down what hikes are shown on the map by region, length, elevation gain, ect.
Location based pins: Ability for a user to click on the map to add a location based pin. These pins could have additional location based notes about the hike (like the location of a great campsite) or a picture that was taken at that location on the hike.