Making an Impact on Covid-19

Members of IMPACT work hard to make a difference in Earth science research while on the clock, but that commitment to contributing to a greater good doesn’t end at the conclusion of the workday. Along with the many thousands of people worldwide working to mitigate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, two IMPACT members, Carson Davis and Ashish Acharya, joined forces to build a website, Huntsville Fighting Covid, to coordinate the efforts of a local group of volunteers who are 3D-printing personal protective equipment to help the medical community.

The website connects the broader community and the core project team. The website acts as the information hub and the medium for people to interact with the project, particularly in its partnership with the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel.

People can go to the website, learn about the project, and volunteer their equipment, time, or money. If people have any questions or suggestions, they can get in touch with the team by filling out a form on the website. The website also doubles as a medium to showcase the results of everyone’s efforts. According to Carson, the motivation was simple:

"While front line workers suffered from a lack of protective gear, and supply chains struggled to keep up, the local maker community could step in and make our own protective gear to address the urgent need."

The website had its origins in a Google spreadsheet created by Carson full of links and recommendations passed from friend to friend to improve the ability of individuals coordinate their efforts in making and distributing 3-D printed faceguards. The coordination needs quickly grew beyond the functionality of a spreadsheet, and the decision was made to create a website

The website was built using Wordpress. It was initially hosted on a Linux-based Virtual Private Server using Docker containers for the website code and the MySQL database. Cloudflare was used for the DNS and the SSL certificate. USer demand was so great, that 522 errors prompted a collaboration with cloud engineers at WPEngine to move the site to a managed Wordpress host for scalability and support. As straightforward as that sounds, Ashish made clear the effort was not without challenges:

"Initially, I hosted the website on my personal server. Since Destin from Smarter Every Day has such a great fanbase, and the website appeared on several news websites, the traffic spiked extremely quickly and brought the site down for a while. We had to scramble to switch to a more scalable web host, but we managed to do it within a couple of hours."

Carson stated it succinctly; it was “an idea so clear and actionable” that these two computer scientists who work together on the clock to deliver solutions to the Earth science community saw the need and committed themselves to meeting it.

View Anish's LinkedIn profile.