Sleep Safe was inspired by Initiative 300 which was up for vote in Denver in May of this year. If voted in favor of, Initiative 300 would have allowed for any individual to engage in activities, such as resting or sheltering oneself in a non-obstructive manner, in outdoor public places without being harassed or ticketed by law enforcement. Unfortunately, Initiative 300 was squashed in a landslide defeat with 81% of voters voting ‘No’ on the ballot. This disenfranchises homeless people and further perpetuates a cycle of homelessness. This is where Sleep Safe comes in; by using our application users can locate homeless shelters using either our application’s web platform, or by simply sending a text message. If users were to visit the web platform, they would be able to search for shelters by zip code within a radius that they would be able to choose. However, we realize that internet is a commodity not accessible for everyone, so to make things a little easier, anyone can text our application with a zip code and be sent back the top 3 homeless shelter’s closest to them. No matter how someone chooses to use our app, they would have access to all of the pertinent information about a homeless shelter like name, address, phone number and hours of operation.
Users can also choose to make an account where in future iterations they will be able to opt in for a service that will automatically send out alerts to make preparations when the weather is forecasted to drop below 40 degrees.
Sleep Safe is brought to you by:
Check out the Sleep Safe repo HERE
Interact with Sleep Safe on Heroku HERE
- Rails
- Ruby
- Google and Twilio APIs
- PostgreSQL database
- Sinatra mico-service
Check out the Sinatra micro-service repo HERE
$ git clone git@github.com:nathangthomas/sleep_safe.git$ bundle$ bundle exec figaro install-- add your API keys to config/application.yml:
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN: "<your Twilio auth token>"
MY_PHONE_NUMBER: "<your phone number>"
TWILIO_NUMBER: "<your twillio number>"
PRODUCTION_API_KEY: "<your production API key>"
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID: "<your Twilio Account SID>"
MESSAGING_SID "<your messaging SID>"```
4. `$ bundle exec rspec install`
5. `$ rails db:{create,migrate}`
6. You can run test suite with `$ bundle exec rspec`
7. Start a local server with `$ rails s` and access Sleep Safe in your browser at localhost:3000