This is the first blog post in a series of posts about a new project I am a part of. More specifically, a capstone project for my computer science degree. As the title of this blog may (or may not) suggest, the project is about plants. Documenting and categorizing native plants in the pacific northwest for a variety of uses. The title of the blog is a silly summary of what the project is: a Minimum Viable Product about native plants. The title might not roll off the tongue, it isn’t perfect; but neither are MVP’s.

The technologies used in the project are mostly familiar too me. I was looking for something intriguing but not terribly challenging. I’m currently working full time and doing school part time, so I can’t dedicate all my time to this project unfortunately. But the time I can give, i’m excited about. Our native plants are something I care a decent deal about, but maybe for backwards reasons. I spend a lot of my free time in the woods mushroom hunting, and native plants are a good sight. You’re not likely to find golden chanterelles buried under English Ivy and blackberry bushes. Native ferns and pines will do the trick however.

The aspect of this i’m most excited about is the spatial data. Working with maps is my jam, and this project just might be a fresh english muffin. Terrible comparisons aside, I love being able to render data onto a map in a useful way. I worked on a personal project I finished this year all about map data, called trails.dog. The overlap in technologies I used in the project and this one are considerable. Namely PostGIS and mapbox, which I am beyond stoked to be using again.

I hope this introductory blog post sets the stage and expected cheesiness for the posts to come in the following weeks. I’m imagining you can expect to find tutorials/frustrations/showcases about specific technologies in this project; especially in relation to the map and spatial data used. Perhaps they’ll be more devlog oriented, or a healthy medium between the two.

Andrew Hepworth – Oct. 3rd, 2022