My experience in Nasa Space Apps Challenge
Tags: personal, reactnative, career
Published: 2020-03-02 17:37:34


#Hi, my name is Gabriel, I'm a Computer Science student at University of Brasília, Brazil, and today I'm going to talk about my experience in this event.

*Sorry if my English is not very good, I will improve over time* 

I started studying Flutter and React Native almost at the same time, but since I wasn't understanding very well both of them, I dropped for a while. In July 2019 I started to learn React and react Native, because I always wanted to develop multi-platform apps.

##Nasa Space Apps Challenge 2018

This year I was at my second period of graduation, and my friends called me to participate on the first edition in my city. My group wasn't the best one because of a few people that kept arguing all the time. Although we finished in the top 20 projects with a solution called Don't Panic, which was a way to change your route based on floods in your city, so you would never be stuck again inside your car 🙃.

I was surprised that we were on the top 20 of the event, and I promised myself that in the next year I would win it 🤓.

##Nasa Space Apps Challenge 2019

That year, almost 1000 people were going to participate, so it was much more competitive than the previous year.

When the event was about to happen this year I joined a team with a friend from Middle school, two friends from University and two more people that I met at the event that are in High school. All the team since the beginning had an incredible chemistry. We chose as our project Spot That Fire V2.0 and we developed [Firewatch](https://github.com/gabssanto/nasaOnFire/tree/master/imgs). 

![Firewatch image](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gabssanto/nasaOnFire/master/imgs/Background.png)

{% youtube pImcDxUwUJQ %}

To talk about the project that we developed I think it's important to explain the context in Brazil. In the beginning of 2019 Amazon Forest was on fire, and beside that, MidWest of Brazil always has a lot of fires by the end of every year. 

So with all that happening in the year we developed a way to help firefighters to prevent initial fire focuses using crowdsourcing and NASA FIRMS database. If we could spot those focuses, we could prevent the fire from spreading and causing climate problems and killing wildlife.

The event started at 20pm at Friday and ended by the end of Sunday. By the end of Saturday we had our first presentation and we didn't go very well. However, after that I called my friends to a calm place and I gave them an idea that we could work for, we could finish a completely funcional MVP by the end of the day, we would show it working live and we would win the event. They all joined me in that crazy idea and we developed a test version. Keep in mind that this was our first real project so we had literally no experience at all developing any kinds of apps.

In the next day we had our presentation and we won the event and it was unbelievable, because even by the fact that I studied a lot for the whole year to win, I never really thought that I would won that prize. I'm incredibly grateful to all my team, they all allowed me to make a dream come true and until the very last moment we were together having fun and creating something that we really believed it could change lives.

##Thanks for reading 😁