COFFEE COMPASS

Final Project - by GA WDIR student Hanna Hauck

SUMMARY

A small web app for keeping track of and analyzing your coffee consumption.

LIVESITE

Link: https://coffeecompass.herokuapp.com/ Link to API: https://coffee-compass-api.herokuapp.com/

TECHNOLOGIES USED

Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AngularJS, jQuery, NodeJS, Express, ChartJS Backend: Ruby on Rails Database: Postgresql

APPROACH TAKEN

RATIONAL

• drinking coffee is an essential part in the daily lives of Americans
• more than half of Americans aged 18+ drink coffee every day (see: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/multimedia-article/facts/)
• this app allows users to track and analyze their coffee consumption
• the purpose is to allow users to get a better understanding of how much coffee they drink as well as how their consumer choices impact their own lives (health / finances), as well as the world around them (environment / society)

TECHNICAL DETAILS

• interactive frontend app, written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AngularJS and jQuery
• Express serves static frontend files
• connected to separate backend API via Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
• API written in Ruby on Rails
• Users can save their information in database (Postgresql)
• authentication / authorization via JSON Webtoken
• third party API: USDA Food Composition Database (https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/)
• retrieved nutritional data for several selected ingredients for coffee beverages (black coffee, expresso, whole milk, instant coffee) and saved it to table in own database
• set up rake task to check once a day if the content was updated (the largest time span heroku allows, otherwise I would have checked for changes to the data once a month)
• when user selects a beverage, nutritional data is calculated based on USDA Food Composition data

CURRENT STATE

• still work in progress!
• some functionality is up and running: users can log in, enter save and read their data
• some functionality is still missing, including: environment section, society section, custom filters

PLANNED IMPROVEMENTS

• design (current state does not reflect my vision for the final version)
• responsive design (current state does not reflect my vision for the final version)
• environment section (not currently functional, will include tally of paper cups used based on the data user entered, graphs to visualize the data, facts/stats
  on general problem with paper cup waste)
• society section (not currently functional, will include tally of fair trade products purchased, option to filter according by rating)
• custom filters to sift through own data (by rating, by label 'fair trade', etc)
• more charts, more interactive data visualization
• more beverage options when entering data (currently user can only choose from a very limited number of beverages)
• more context (currently only basic details are offered in the background section)