A few months ago, I came across the Sandre website and their many public APIs, and had the thought that so much data available freely to the public was a great opportunity. At first, I wanted to dive deep in the development of a futuristic web app with 3D JavaScript rendering of rivers, stations, river flows, water quality data, etc. and got a little ambitious, especially with the time I could dedicate to that kind of side project.
I experimented at first with a GraphQL backend coupled with a PostgreSQL database, and wanted to link that to an Angular frontend since my recent professional projects involved these technologies (except GraphQL). This stack made me waste so much time to just fetch and display a list of rivers, some details about these, and the list of stations of said rivers, that I dropped all of it after a few weeks and rebooted the project with a Streamlit app, a technology I came across while looking through the work of a colleague. What a blessing, in a few hours I had an app with information about rivers and data to display, what you could call a functioning web app.
I am currently in a feature development phase, now that the foundations of this project are set. You can find the deployed version here, please don’t judge, this is worse than an alpha at this stage, but I am proud of having launched the 0.0.1 of Hydros.