What is "Peaks and Beaks"?

"Peaks and Beaks" is my capstone project for Harvard's CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript. I designed this application to create a fun way to stay active, share the routes you've created with your community, and enjoy and take note of the natural world around you.

Users can create custom routes to run, hike, bike, row or walk and opt to keep those to themselves or share them with their community. Track your activities, distance, route difficulty, and enjoyability, and whether you saw any of the animals you'd been hoping to see on your wishlist along the way.

Initially, I was looking at integrating the Cornell Birds API for users to get information about what they've seen. On a whim, Peaks and Beaks had a nice ring to it. I later found a business with a similar name Beaks and Peaks. They offer birdwatching tours. I still liked the name Peaks and Beaks, as one must first climb the peaks to see wildlife. After experimenting with the Cornell API, the data was limited for the experience I wanted users to have. I opted for a more general API, the Animal Ninjas API.

The spirit of Peaks and Beaks is to explore the idea of citizen conservation by staying active and exploring our natural surroundings. Users are encouraged to get creative with their activities and keep a journal about what they've seen and a wishlist of animals they're curious about. The more we notice about our lived environment, the more we can appreciate it and want to take action to protect it.

Peaks and Beaks is a Web Application built on GeoDjango, utilizing the Leaflet.js Library, Chart.js library, and API Ninja's animal API for wishlist creation.

Features include

• Custom route creation for a specific activity, with the ability to keep routes private
• Route Visualization on Open Street Maps
• Activity tracking based on user's routes, or other user's public routes
• Activity feed, seeing what users have tracked, how enjoyable they found it, and how difficult they found it
• Wishlist creation - search for animals on the API Ninja's animals API and, learn about the species, add them to your wishlist
• Add Observations to your activities - did you see any animals on your wishlist?
• User preferences for miles vs. kilometers, light vs. dark mode, avatar or profile photo uploads, and geolocation preferences
• Gallery with all the user's observations split up using Django pagination

Questions, comments, suggestions?

Feel free to get in touch 📩

I welcome all constructive feedback and suggestions. If this project resonates with you, thank you.