Technical Thoughts & Details
The Age Old Question…. What to Build First?!?
If you have explored my web page for more than 3 minutes you can tell that I live in Colorado, love to travel and I also am a camper! While out in the mountains I hike to alpine lakes, dominate reservoirs or wade up/down rivers to fish…. but sometimes you strike out. There’s ample reasons for this but there’s a few context clues that may help you like temperature, when are the stockings are scheduled, elevation, time of day and so on. This is where I will be honing in on, trying to gather all of this information updated at a frequent cadence to assist myself and hopefully others in figuring out when to go fishing.
How will I accomplish this?
To start I will be building API calls to populate as much of this information into a database as I can, once this information is stored I will try scraping public government data for the missing pieces if there are any.
Once all of the information is pulled I will try building both a phone application in addition to a web application just so I can dabble in both worlds and learn way more. I’ve never developed using JavaScript so this will be an EPIC challenge!
Data Platform
Listed below are the tools I will be using in order to accomplish these tasks:
– IDE: VS Code
– Database: Supabase
– Web App Framework: React
– Phone App Framework: React Native
Hurdle # 1 – Geoloaction
After scraping the Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) for the locations Colorado stocks I was quickly met with how these locations do not include the nearest city which is required to pull weather information for that surrounding location. To work through this I tried referencing the scraped values for Forward Geocoding and storing the Lat/Long within Supabase to pull more accurate weather information for these locations.
Overall everything went well other than some of the scraped values being finicky like Cottonwood Lake #1 & Arkansas River #3B. After removing anything after the #, truncating & Rebuilding my tables it successfully found the city, latitude and longitude for all locations scraped from the CPW site.