WasteWatch: Turning a Small Idea into a Real-World Project with AWS
WasteWatch is a web application designed to make reporting garbage problems easier and help communities view waste locations on a map. In this article, I share the idea behind the project, our experience deploying it with Amazon EC2, and what I learned along the way.
Have you ever walked past a pile of garbage on the roadside and wondered why it was still there? Waste in public places is something many communities deal with, but reporting it is not always easy.
That got us thinking: could we use technology to make waste reporting simpler and help people become more aware of problems in their neighborhoods?
This idea led us to build WasteWatch, a web application focused on making waste reporting more accessible.
The idea behind WasteWatch
WasteWatch is designed to give people one place to report garbage problems and view reported waste locations on a map.
Imagine noticing a pile of garbage near your home or an empty plot. With a platform like WasteWatch, you can share information about the problem and help make its location visible to others.
Our goal is to make reporting easier for local residents and encourage community participation. The platform could also help volunteers and municipal teams identify areas that may need attention.
We know that a website alone cannot solve the waste management problem. However, we believe that making problems easier to report and see is a useful place to start.
Moving from local development to the cloud
While developing WasteWatch, we realized that getting an application to work on a local computer is only one part of the process. If other people are going to use it, the application needs to run somewhere they can access it.
This is where Amazon EC2 became important to our project.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides virtual servers in the AWS cloud. We used EC2 to deploy and host WasteWatch, giving us practical experience with running a web application outside our local development environment.
The deployment process also helped us understand the importance of preparing the server environment, configuring the application, and setting up network access so users can reach it.
How we used AWS
Our main AWS service for WasteWatch was Amazon EC2.
We used it for:
- Application hosting: Running WasteWatch on a cloud-based server.
- Deployment: Moving the application from local development to an AWS environment.
- Accessibility: Configuring the environment and network access needed to make the application available to users.
This experience gave us a better understanding of how cloud infrastructure supports web applications in practice.
We did not specifically integrate an AWS open-source framework or toolkit into this project. Rather than listing tools we have not used, we want to be clear about the AWS technology that was actually part of our implementation.
What I learned from the experience
One of my biggest takeaways was that building an application and deploying it are two different challenges.
During development, it is easy to focus on features and whether everything works on your computer. Deployment introduces additional questions: Does the server have the required environment? Does the application start correctly? Can users access it? Are the necessary security settings configured?
Working with EC2 helped me understand these practical considerations and see how cloud computing fits into everyday software development.
It also reminded me that learning happens through implementation. Reading about cloud services is useful, but working through the process of deploying a project makes the concepts easier to understand.
What's next for WasteWatch?
WasteWatch is a starting point, and there are several improvements we would like to explore as the project grows.
Some possibilities include better report-status tracking, ways to verify completed cleanups, and tools to identify locations where garbage problems occur repeatedly.
We could also evaluate additional AWS services if future requirements call for features such as dedicated image storage or managed database infrastructure. These would be future enhancements, not services we are claiming to have already implemented.
Final thoughts
Building WasteWatch has been an opportunity to connect software development with a problem people encounter in everyday life. It has also given us practical experience deploying a web application using Amazon EC2.
We still have plenty to learn and improve, but that is part of building something useful. Start with a real problem, create a practical solution, and keep learning as you go.
If WasteWatch can make waste problems easier to report and encourage people to take greater care of their surroundings, we will have taken a meaningful step toward our goal.
Enjoyed reading this content? Let the author know!
Your likes, comments, shares, and saves help creators reach more builders.
Loading recommendations
Loading article