PIA (Public Information App)

A tracking application that monitors the routes of snow plows in the city of Pittsburgh

Technologies Used

  • JavaScript
  • Responsive Design
  • SASS
  • Gulp

Note: Due to the fact that the app is seasonally triggered it may not always be up and running.

TeMeDa's PIA (Public Information App), is an application that displays and monitors the routes of snow plows that travel around the City of Pittsburgh whenever the city's trucks are out and about spreading salt and plowing snow.

The city was encountering a number of complaints from residents that the plows weren't making down their street. So the city tool it upon themselves to commision TeMeDa to build them an application that would give residents the piece of mind that their street was being serviced.

View Project 
Laptop representation of the Chicago Northwest Website

My role on this project consisted of performing a little bit of a facelift on the front-end architecture of the application. The application wasn't originally built with scalability in mind, it used separate unprocessed, (i.e. - minification, concatenation, etc.), HTML, CSS, & JavaScript files for the front-end.

The front-end needed to be a little easier to edit and maintain and run, so I proposed and implemented a build process using Vagrant, with VirtualBox, to virtualize a local server and allow for local running, development, and testing. NPM & Gulp handled the lion's share of the package managmeent and build process. Additionally I reworked the CSS to use SASS to allow for more maintainable styling.

Furthermore, the app wasn't very responsive initially, so I also gave the front-end a bit of a responsive refresh to allow its use on mobile devices.

Mobile phone responsive represenation of Chicago Northwest Website