So when I went to move this from the original site into WordPress a few months after the bootcamp was over, my post for week 10 had no content.
It was a crazy week and then afterward I was just so glad for a little break. But I will try to reconstruct it a little from memory.
Finishing Up Our Capstone
My teammates handled a lot of the non-map stuff. This included user login/logout operations, header and footer design, additional info pages, a legend and more.
I focused on our map. After getting the crime data on the week before my goal was to add the properties. I already had the background layer that color-coded them by value, but I also wanted people to be able to click on a property and see information like the address and exact value from our database.
I also spent a lot of time working with how to handle the large data sets we had.
Our original database query took forever. Whenever somebody moves the map, the browser makes a call to our site for the data for the new area. As they are moving it, multiple calls can be made along the way and they would all take several seconds.
I tried making it so that there was a pause between new requests for data, but did not have enough time to get that working. I did change the database query so that it was much, much faster so that it wasn’t so much of an issue.
I also played a lot with the zoom levels required for a type of data to display. This prevents a massive amount of points from displaying when a user is zoomed out.
There are too many crime incidents to display them all when the map is too zoomed out. It would be nice to have a heatmap layer that displays when zoomed out instead of individual points, but we did not have time for that.
The sad thing is that as is, one can’t zoom out far enough to really see if there are city-wide patterns with hot zones for the crimes.
Otherwise, I am ridiculously proud of our project: APCIMAP.com.
Employer Presentations
Employer presentations are the morning of the last day. We were all super nervous.
It turned out really well. Some of the people there have seen presentations from many previous cohorts and they were still really impressed with what we’d put together.
We were the first group in the history of Deep Dive Coding to work with such large datasets, much less two of them.
It felt amazing to show off what we’d worked so hard on for weeks.
Graduation
The afternoon was graduation day. We got to have lunch and show off our projects to our families.