Web Developer Intern at Philadelphia Urban Creators
I began working as a part time intern for Emily Cornuet from Temple University/Philadelphia Urban Creators on October 12th, 2015. Emily is building a garden sensor with an Arduino Uno in order to gather data from plants she is growing at the Defend Your Future community garden on 15th and Diamond on Temple’s campus. My primary responsibilities are developing and maintaining a web app, managing an Ubuntu server, consulting on technical decisions, and assisting with Arduino Uno programming.
The web app I’m developing is a blog and plant database. Emily and I were planning on using a WordPress blog but soon realized that without extensive UI/UX redesign and some back end modification we wouldn’t achieve the end result we were hoping for.
The MEAN stack is MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, and Node.js. MongoDB is a No SQL database that stores information in JSON, Express.js is a server framework for Node.js and Angular.js is a front end framework for making dynamic single page websites. In addition to MEAN I’m using the NPM package manager and several libraries and packages like Twitter’s UI Bootstrap for UI, Mongoose as a MongoDB framework, and Passport for authentication. I use Git for version control. Thanks to the folks at Atlassian I’m able to host my repository privately for free on Bitbucket.
The Defend Your Future Garden site is currently at version 0.7.2 and features a blog and plant database. The site doesn’t have any content yet but in the spring, after planting, vegetables will be added to the database along with ideal growing conditions. After the plant is added its picture is automatically added to a Bootstrap carousel on the homepage. As plant data is collected with the Arduino sensors it will be added to the database.
Before the site hits version 1.0 it will have a whole new look and several features will be added, some front facing and others are for site administrators. Some additions include the ability to search for posts and plants, update user passwords, and implementing Google Analytics.
Because Emily and I had a hard time finding a free to use plant information API we plan on allowing access to the plant database on defendyourfuturegarden.com as a JSON API for use as a reference or for others making garden sensors.
During the Fall 2015 semester, because of conflicting schedules, Emily and I held weekly meetings at the Digital Scholarship Center in the library and I primarily worked from home. Because I wasn’t able to go to the library more often it was difficult for me to assist with programming the Arduino Uno. For Spring 2015 I have a shorter work week and only one class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday so I hope to spend more time in the library working on the Arduino Uno.