View the favorite neighborhoods of Neighborhoods.com employees on a map

The goal of this demo is to provide a playground that does the following

1. Use data from https://www.neighborhoods.com/about/our-team
2. Extract a favorite location from the biography (i.e Alex's favorite neighborhood is West Loop in Chicago.)
3. Attempt to geocode this location to turn the text into a point on the earth.
4. Present the points on an interactive map.

• Geocoding unstructured text is unreliable. Look at http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug page to see the input and output of the geocoding for pins that look to be in an odd location.
  • Mapbox provides page to see what filters can applied https://www.mapbox.com/search-playground
• The layout of the map hides points when they are overlapping, this makes finding a specific name difficult.
  • In Chicago there are a stacked points (i.e. Logan Square, or Wicker Park) where people have the same favorite neighborhood. Offsetting the points slightly, or selecting a different POI can help spread out the points.
• The color scheme and icons are boring.

• Flask web microframework
• Requests API client
• Mapbox provides geocoding and the Javascript map API

To get all the tools you'll need run, edit, and debug this code we'll use Brew to manage packages.

Follow the instructions at https://brew.sh/ which should tell you to use the following command:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Now that brew is installed lets get our other tools:

brew install git python3

Grab the code from this repository:

git clone [email protected]:alexberryman/hello-neighbors.git

Change into the directory with code:

cd hello-neighbors

Create a virtual python environment to store out libraries:

python3 -m venv env

Activate the virtual environment:

source env/bin/activate

Install the necessary libraries:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a settings.py from the example:

cp settings.py.example settings.py

Create a Mapbox account at https://www.mapbox.com, place the key into settings.py

vim settings.py

Launch the app:

APP_CONFIG_FILE="settings.py" python main.py

Visit the page to see the map:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/