Development Planning Unit Alumni Website
Myself and a colleage were commissioned to produce an alumni website for the
Development Planning Unit, UCL, to allow their alumni to interact with each
other on a dedicated platform. For this I developed a continuous pipeline that
updated the website data based on a firebase database of new alumni sign-ups using
GitHub action, and created a dashboard that allowed the department to accept or
reject new users alongside visualise website usage statistics. This was created
over a period of two weeks where the following tasks were completed:
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A python script was created that geocoded the locational information of users into a GeoJSON
that could be served up to the website to use in the Mapbox visualisation.
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A GitHub action was set up to load in new data from the firebase database every 12 hours into the
Python script, which would then create a refreshed GeoJSON
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A Plotly Dash dashboard was created and hosted on Heroku that would give the department the ability to
visualise usage statistics including active users and where they are located. Additional functionality
included a downloadable table that contained contact information for users who wished to be included on
regular corresponence, and an interactive table that provided the department the ability to accept or reject
users based on their profile information which would then feed into the GitHub Actions work in that only
verified users would be displayed on the maps created
The website has been successfull running for the past year and successfully hosts over 300 active users.