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hey! my organization (concrete jungle: http://www.concrete-jungle.org http://www.concrete-jungle.org) would love some help. we pick fruit growing on the side of
by durkie 15y ago
hey! my organization (concrete jungle: http://www.concrete-jungle.org http://www.concrete-jungle.org) would love some help. we pick fruit growing on the side of the road and in people's yards all over the atlanta area and we donate it to local homeless shelters and food banks -- we donated over 3200 lbs / 1450 kg of fresh produce this year on basically zero budget and all volunteer efforts.
there's a lot of logistics in managing the various fruit trees and we use a google map for doing so (also have a public google map for showing folks things that are nearby).
off the top of my head, things we would love:
* making the map faster (optimizing the code, showing fewer points at more zoomed-out levels, whatever).
* being able to directly edit/update our sqlite fruit tree database from our google map
* any sort of interesting features for our mobile app (or even making a native android app!)
* making charts of when we have picked certain fruits in the past to illustrate approximate ripeness schedules.
* any sort of way to improve our picking logistics -- doing weekly picks from many trees that all ripen at slightly different times without driving all over the city is hard.
* anything to clean up/secure/speed up our code -- i did it all and am not a coder by training or by trade.
- lisper 15y agoWhat's your code written in?
- durkie 15y agoPHP and Javascript
- Alex3917 15y ago"we pick fruit growing on the side of the road and in people's yards all over the atlanta area and we donate it to local homeless shelters and food banks" That seems questionable. Normally you aren't supposed to eat anything from near the side of the road because there is often still tons of lead and other contaminants there from the cars. This is especially true of food that comes from trees, because they accumulate these contaminants inside of them.
- durkie 15y agoit is a complicated issue with such a wide variety of places that we pick from, and the uptake amount and destination within the plant varies by species and the pollutant in question. my understanding is that in general plants do not extensively uptake lead or arsenic, and that most cases of heavy metal ingestion from produce comes from poorly washing it, or not peeling roots/tubers (which we don't pick) for what it's worth, we have made cider from our apples and had it tested for heavy metals, which it passed ("below threshold" -- not clear if that was the detection limit of the machine, or against a concentration standard) the vast majority of things we pick are also actually from people's yards (with permission -- no one wants what they've got). while the assumption there is that it is safer soil than something that's literally next to the interstate, it is true though that we have not tested the soil of every single place we pick. it also brings up the question of how safe "real" farmland is, as many of them are located near roadsides, or once used lead arsenate as an insecticide, or ...