Hope In Rain

Roles: Backend Development and data mining system

Hopeinrain.org is a fundraising website that was developed with a team from VCU’s Brandcenter in 2010 for UNICEF’s Tap project. The website provides a donation mechanism that is based on the amount of fresh, rain water your town has gotten in the last month, $1/inch.

My primary responsibility on this website was the backend development, PayPal integration, and building the data mining system that collects and regularly updates the rainfall totals from all of the listed cities. The data mining was the most interesting part of this project for me. Most existing weather API’s will return results about current weather or 7 day forecasts, but none that we could find have historic weather built into them. So I had to build our own system for gathering this data.

The system pulls the appropriate CSV file for the past month from wunderground.com, crunches the precipitation numbers. and finally updates the database to reflect the current rainfall in the past month. This is set as a scheduled task on the server through crontabs to update all of the cities in our database on a daily basis. The system can handle an arbitrary number of cities and throttles itself to prevent unnecessary server load.

A simple admin panel allows for monitoring for all the cities, manually updating the cities, batch process updating, and adding or deleting cities.