My First Hackathon

NASA SPACE APPS CHALLENGE

Learning, exploration, problem solving, pushing your abilities and searching skills to their limits, and most importantly having fun is what a hackathon is all about. The Athens hackerspace is a very cool place to be creative. It also belongs to the Libre Space Foundation.I was pleasantly surprised by the hospitality and the friendliness of the hackerspace team. They really created a nice and cozy place to focus and work. I was able to find one more person who wanted to participate and created a duo named the Fellowship of the Drought!

Figuring out the project was not easy. We wanted an application that actually made sense and it could actually help. We read a lot about satellites and their data. In the end, we decided to create an application that focuses on drought mapping using the Copernicus Sentinel-2 Satellite. 

The Project

As the sole developer of the team, I decided to work with Flask and Python to for the back-end because I am quite comfortable with it. I ended up having trouble with getting the correct colors on the results. For now, the user can input the area they are interested in and the application grabs the grey-scale map of the area.We were able to come really close to a prototype but I hit a brick wall because I was not able to generate colored maps which was very frustrating. I spent way too much time trying to find a solution but was never able to fix it. I am happy that I was able to submit the project to the space apps. Our tries did not go in vain. 

What the future holds

I aim to start working on the project again on later date using PHP instead. Why PHP? It is a very important tool in the world of web development and laravel looks very nice to work with. It is also much nicer to work with compared to Python or JavaScript in my opinion.
I will go back to this project after I finish Motion Media. I do not want to complicate things by handling multiple projects at the same time.

Demonstration