For the final stint of our CodeClan course, we had two weeks to build whatever we wanted for our ‘capstone project’. Our instructor Pawel pitched a great idea to the class of creating an app to simplify the process of checking your bin collection day. Large number of Edinburgh residents need to remember when tu put their bins on the street (e.g. every second Tuesday). Pawel showed us the current process of checking what’s your bin pickup day and we couldn’t believe it. The process is tedious, and after around 12 steps you get to a pdf file, which you can print to see when all of your bins are due to be collected.
Lewis, David and George were all drawn to this idea and formed a team to work on this as a group project. What attracted us the most about this idea is that it had a real world use and potential to make a positive impact on the community. Little did we know that six weeks later, here we are continuing our adventure, improving our app daily and constantly looking for ways to make it better and more efficient.
We got to work straight away, pitching our ideas to each other. Pretty quickly we came to the conclusion that a mobile app would be a great idea. Not only will it be easily accessible to the community, but it gives us an opportunity to learn a new framework that we had not been taught on the course. It would also allow us to implement features that would be beneficial to the users. What if we could send push notifications? What if we can use geolocation so it’s even easier for the user to search for their street? Again, these would be libraries that we hadn’t used before but we were excited and driven by the opportunity to learn new things.
However, we started investigating the data on the council website… there was no API, no easy access to the days when bins are picked up apart of 5000 links to pdf files.
To be continued in episode 2….
Stay tuned!