GHG Tracker

Overview

For the Spring 2021 ICS 414 Software Engineering II class, we were assigned one major project in groups of 8 to 9 for the entire semester. We had to create a greenhouse gas tracker website with Hawaiian Electric Industries, which allows users to track their commutes and mode of transportation. In return, using the inputted information determines how much greenhouse gas they either produce or reduce. Alongside this requirement, we added other aspects, such as individual and cumulative reports and visualizations.

Contribution

For this project, I mainly focused on the Vehicles and MyVehicles collection. Users had to add their personal vehicle, and based on the miles per gallon, it was possible to calculate the greenhouse gas produced or reduced if they rode alternative transportation. With the help of the web-scraping of vehicles by one of my teammates, I created a reactive form where the model options depended on the selected make and the year options depended on the selected make and model.

See our github.io page here: Hot-n-Code

See our project repository here: GitHub

Experience

What made this a unique project was that we were entirely online. The only form of communication was through discord, a messaging and talking platform. It took a while for my group to get moving, especially during the planning phases where we discussed the direction and layout of this project. This experience showed me the importance of having project management and communicating efficiently together. In addition, we were encouraged to meet at least twice a week to discuss the current progress of our milestone. This procedure ensures constant planning and prevents overlaps and merge conflicts. It may seem tedious, but all these factors played a role in the completion of our project.

Besides coding, we also presented our website and progress to the class and during customer meetings. During this process, we received a lot of helpful feedback that we incorporated. It was also amazing to see other groups and their ideas outside of the main objective of tracking users’ commutes.