What is Recycle.it
Recycle.it was a TCC project (Course Conclusion Paper - Final Paper), conceptualized and created by me and João Gilberto @gjoao11, project partner. In this task, we had to carry out scientific research on our topic, which was focused on the exponential growth of waste being discarded and managed incorrectly, as well as the main negative effects that this generates in nature and impacts the world. After carrying out all the research, we developed a website that would help in one of the steps towards better waste management, proper disposal. Recycle.it is a solid waste geolocation website, it is basically a Google Maps of waste collection points. The collection point, as the name suggests, is a specific location used to store the population's waste. These points can be created by any person/entity, in order to record on the map that that point may contain plastic waste, glass, metals, electronics, among others. Furthermore, anyone can locate these points and follow their routes. The website works very well when used together with city councils, where they can organize the best routes and times for garbage trucks to collect waste, saving time, fuel and money. Another use case is for anyone interested in making use of waste, such as potential artists who might reuse plastic waste to make whatever they want.
Along with all the research and presentation of the project, all software documentation, functional and non-functional requirements, use case diagrams, technologies used, why we use those technologies, etc. were also written. The entire body of introduction to the content, development, defense and conclusion of the thesis were presented in this work.
Bigger difficulties
The biggest difficulties were linked to the development of the software, all of our coordinator's research and evaluations were done in less than 3 months, it wasn't difficult, just a little time-consuming. As Recycle.it was our first big project, and we wanted to do it well, we struggled to execute it haha. We already had experience with some other small projects, creating login systems, CRUD's, data persistence/authentication, file uploads, etc. In short, it is not a complex website, its biggest difference is in the map, registration and handling of collection points, where we use the Leaflet.JS library. Furthermore, we were just two people to create everything from documentation and design, to actual development, in addition to using some technologies that were a little new to us at the time, such as Next.JS, Prisma.io and Leaflet.JS itself.
If I remember, it took us between 6-8 months to complete everything, it may seem like it took a long time to do 'little', but remember that while we were doing the TCC we were still studying a full course, in addition to, at the time, being beginners, so I believe we've done it in a good while :).
So, where is the application deployment?
We were immensely happy with the TCC result, as were our evaluators, but, when we completed everything and graduated, we put the project aside and decided to rest and think about other projects, whether they were related to programming or not. After a few months, we realized that the application broke due to several technologies being updated, as well as some others ending their support and becoming obsolete. We were really sad, considering the care we put into this project, but, during the development process, we ended up using some technologies that didn't have much support, which ended up being our negligence and causing the application to fall into disrepair. At the time of development we thought about just finishing the project and moving on to something else, nowadays we find ourselves extremely regretful, as a project like this greatly demonstrates your knowledge of software development, in addition to being a well-documented project. We even tried to refactor the code and update some techs, but we saw that it wasn't worth the effort, considering that a lot of things had changed. So, unfortunately, for now his execution is only in our memories, but who knows, maybe one day we will bring him back. Below are some images from Recycle.it ALIVE.