The Fires Begin
With the wildfires approaching, UCLA switched to online classes and I drove back to the Bay Area to get to safety. I wanted to track the fires and see how they were affecting campus and my classmates still there. But tracking the fires was a mess. You needed to check:
- Multiple sources for AQI data
- PurpleAir sensors
- Government air quality sites
- Local weather stations
- Different map services
- CalFire maps
- News outlet fire trackers
- Satellite imagery
- Campus information
- Live camera feeds
- Official alerts
- Social media updates All these disjoint sources made it hard to stay informed.
I saw an opportunity to help. By aggregating all this data into one website, students and parents could have a single source for fire information. I built an dashboard in just a few hours (thanks Claude 3.5 Sonnet). Check it out here: GitHub Repo. Speed was the priority over perfect code, I needed to ship something useful fast.
I launched it the day after on Monday (1/13) across multiple platforms, the site gained significant traction:
- Reddit: 400+ upvotes
- X (Twitter): 500k views
- LinkedIn: 2k views
- Instagram: 1000+ views
Here's the IG post describing the project.
An hour after launch though something crazy happened. The digital media coordinator at UCLA sent me a strongly worded email:
"You need to take uclafire.org offline immediately. We are getting reports related to the site as it is creating confusion within our community and outside about UCLA's fire reporting and management. You cannot use UCLA's trademarks as you do not own, represent, nor have permission to use the mark in any form. This is highly improper especially during a time of crisis. Please take this down immediately."
"Thank you for your immediate action,"
I was using UCLA but not the exact logo so wasn't sure if that was okay. I responded asking if I could keep it up using a different name and they agreed. So I moved UCLA to Westwood and continued to grow the site.
That was my first ever cease and desist letter.
By the end of the day I scaled to 1.3M requests and 40k users. That was insane. Real people were using my product and liking it. If I was able to help even one person, I was happy.
The moral of the story is: just build things. Who cares what people say or think? It won't matter if no one sees your project. Build a small version and just ship it. If I didn't push out the first version so fast, someone else would have beat me to it. I didn't care about the details (and using UCLA's name lol) and just put it in front of people's eyeballs. I received a lot of feedback and made changes accordingly as well as optimizations to save money.
(shoutout upstash for giving me free credits for the cache!)