CarbonZero

The purpose of this application is to provide users with a fun way to improve the sustainability of their lifestyle. CarbonZero helps to foster an environmentally-conscious community by allowing users to share sustainability-related challenges and organize volunteer opportunities which can be completed in order to gain individual points as well as to improve their neighborhood’s sustainability score. Accumulating points enables users to level-up their profile as well as purchase digital badges as well as sponsor-provided incentives.

Contributions

My primary contribution was in creating the forum through which users can create and comment on posts. Aside from this I contributed by creating the scoring system, the experience and leveling system, and assisting in making components on other pages functional such as the leaderboard.

Takeaways

This project was the second web application I’ve contributed to. There wasn’t a lot to learn since the tech-stack was mostly the same as with the previous one. One of the key differences in this experience was that most of the development took place within a span of a few days rather than weeks. Working with a tech stack I was familiar with enabled me to be more productive as well as focus on implementing good coding practices rather than being primarily concerned with getting the app to work.

Source: Sus-Gawky
Deployment
Meteor blog post
University of Hawai'i News article