EARTHQUAKE OR BUS?

If you live in San Francisco, especially in an older building, you're probably felt unidentified shaking before. It's always a mystery: was that an earthquake? Or did a bus just drive by?

This app gets the user's location data and then fetches local earthquakes from the USGS and current vehicle positions from Muni. Using a simple, easily-tweakable algorithm to determine if an earthquake was significant enough to have been felt by the user, the app then yields a clickable list of possible earthquakes or a list of nearby busses.

Demo Mode: if the user is not in SF or chooses not to allow location services, they can still demo the app using the available button on the error screen. The user will be presented with four places in SF to use the app "from".

Technical Bits

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App. That comes with lovely things like CSS post-processing (to minify and add appropriate vendor prefixes) and Webpack (for bundling niceties and such).

I added Redux for sane state management, and created a backend using Node/Express for serving up the static contents and making external API calls. It's a single-page app that has very minimal user navigation, so I rolled my own custom router (in App.js) rather than add anything heavier. The client is transpiled using Babel; I didn't bother transpiling the server mostly because it's fun to remember different ways of writing JS.

Styling is intentially minimal as I'm not a designer. =)

Structure

Client lives in /src, server lives in /server. Entry points are index.js for each, respectively.

Scripts

In the project directory, you can run:

npm start

Runs the app in production mode. Note: you MUST run npm run build first! Open http://localhost:9000 to view it in the browser.

npm test

Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode.

npm run build

Builds the app for production to the build folder. It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.

The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.

npm run eject

**Note: this is a one-way operation. Once you eject, you can’t go back!

For custom config tweaking. This will remove react-scripts from the dependencies and add the various dependencies and scripts it includes.

TODO

• better error handling
• add support for other cities (anywhere a public transit API is available that gives current vehicle positions)
• add to "demo mode" to see all earthquakes (not just "significant" ones) for demo capabilities