Indecisiveness. While interviewing over 5 University students and several JamHacks participants, we came to one conclusion. People struggle coming up with outfits on a daily basis, and the primary cause is due to weather. People of all demographics, especially students, choose outfits that don’t cater to the weather. For example, the temptation to wear your banger fit, a t-shirt and shorts with 10 degree weather! Or, when you step outside in the morning, realize it’s cold, wear a sweatshirt and jeans, but then regret it after experiencing the blazing hot afternoon temperatures.
We aim to help people save time in the morning. Fashion Forecast is a unique, multifunctional website that allows users to find outfit inspirations according to the weather. It also contains many special features, such as a calendar, a closet where users can pick their selected or desired clothes, and a sign in system to further personalize outfits for each individual.
To build our website, we used HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Python on VS Code. We used HTML, CSS, and JS to code our front-end part of our website, and Python to web scrape the weather data.
This by far has to be one of our most chaotic projects, as we faced an astronomical amount of problems. We were constantly seeking mentors to debug our code, and struggled adjusting to new languages and technological concepts.
The first major challenge we ran into was collaboration on GitHub. We didn’t have a thorough understanding of GitHub and were initially going to use VSCode Liveshare. However, by persisting through our blood, sweat, and tears, we managed to fork and make commits efficiently as a team.
We also exposed ourselves to new languages that weren’t explored as in-depth previously. For example, learning JavaScript, which most members were inexperienced in, attempting back-end flask with Python, web scraping, and even utilizing Open Weather Map API. Our team faced numerous bugs, many of which were extremely difficult to solve.
We’re extremely proud of pushing ourselves to explore new technological concepts that we were never aware of or dealt with before. As well, we’re also proud of being able to host a functional website that fulfilled most of the duties we aimed for.
We learned that the process of a project is more important than the outcome. We realized that the components of a website aren’t merely just a few pieces of HTML and CSS code, but have multiple factors, and components, that all tie together to create the final product.
By challenging ourselves to confront new languages and APIs, we were able to accumulate a significantly greater understanding of them. Furthermore, JamHacks 7 was a huge motivation factor for us to apply in future hackathons and personal projects. It demonstrated that it is possible to tackle what seems impossible. We also learned how to implement JSON into HTML, CSS, and JS.
In the future, we plan to use OpenCV and AI to create more personalized wardrobes, tailored specifically by style. This also looks like users uploading pictures of their own clothing, and the website creating unique outfits based on their uploaded pictures.