Arcade Creek Project

The Arcade Creek Project is the nation's largest environmental monitoring group run by high school students. Over 350 students work in 11 different studies (Botany, Chemistry, Outreach, Restoration, etc) monitoring the Arcade Creek, California's largest urban watershed. Over the past 18 years, members have logged more than 50,000 combined hours monitoring and improving the creek's health. I worked as Technology Team Manager when I was in high school.

Recently, I've continued my work with the project by updating their public outreach website, and creating a web app to enable easier management. The public site needed to be brought up to modern web standards; the old site was non-responsive, included a Flash-based banner, and was rarely updated. I updated the site to a modern design and modern technologies (including Git to enable version control) and have run several training sessions to bring new members up-to-speed on the new features.

The new web app was a significantly more complicated undertaking. Previously the project used a Bento database to track equipment inventory, volunteer information and hours, and study data. I created a web app using the Meteor framework, enabling a much more versatile management system. Members can RSVP to scheduled outings, track their hours, and message other project members. Team managers can track where their equipment is and ensure that all members are participating.

In the process of building the app, I learned a great deal that led me to begin a rewrite of the app. Version 2.0 will be an update to the underlying technologies to enable better features and functionality, and to fix bugs that have cropped up in version 1.0. The app is no longer Meteor-based, as the monolithic structure and Meteor's build process magic meant that maintenance and improvements were hard to undertake. Instead I've shifted to a more decoupled infrastructure (although I haven't settled on a front-end/view framework), and I'm designing the app to be a Progressive Web App (Google-jargon) with offline and push messaging support.