Week 10: On Fire

So, it’s the last week. My final product has been submitted, my last timesheet has been made. So for one last time, let’s go through the race to the end that was Week 10 of my senior project.

First up was the time slider. I went back and ran my model on all data from 2013 to 2018, and loaded those predictions into my backend server instead of simply the last week. While that was relatively straightforward, the difficult part was cleaning up the layout on the frontend, such as spacing out the week labels so that they wouldn’t overlap, and adding small fire icons directly on top of the slider so the user can tell which weeks actually had fires. 

Next, I implemented a heatmap on top of the actual grid over Butte County. At first, I tried using the React Heatmap component, but it looked slightly unnatural over the squares. Instead, I recolored the grids on a linear scale from green to red, experimenting until I achieved the maximum contrast that best represented the differences in fire-proneness that week. As a note, the colors are only relative in a single week, not over multiple weeks, so if the highest proneness in a single week is around 0.5, it will look redder than 0.5 in a week where 0.9 is the highest proneness.

At this point, I learned that I wouldn’t be able to bring my laptop to the showcase, so in the remaining days, I decided to try to deploy my project on Render. Unfortunately, however, the free plan on Render only supports a maximum of 512 MB of memory, and I kept hitting that limit when my server uploaded my data to pandas from CSV. Therefore, I devised code that incrementally saves my data using a cache, very slowly loading my data on the backend. After hours of decoding, I finally had a working (although slow) web app! After a few fixes, like improvising descriptions on the feature sidebar, I was finally done.

It’s bittersweet to be writing this final blog post. These past ten weeks have been an incredible journey filled with challenges, breakthroughs, and countless learning experiences. I’m proud of the work accomplished and hopeful that this project can contribute to wildfire prevention efforts in the future. Thanks for following along!