I was bored one day and decided to see if I could find anything relating to the code exercise SpaceX uses for their internship applications. While searching GitHub, I came across two projects whose README files explained a bit about what they had to do for their exercises. They had to write a web application to display ground stations taken from NASA's Satellite Situation Center API. It also called for displaying country flags for each ground station which I achieved through the free Geoname's Geocoding API. Using the ISO-3166 alpha-2 country codes, I was able to reference FamFamFam's flag icons while creating the points on the map. I believe this only took me a couple of hours to make - probably less considering I was doing this during free time in my senior high school classes and included the time in between classes in my total. All-in-all, it was a fun challenge and definitely something I would be willing to do to get an internship. I'll probably end up playing with the SSC API a lot more once I have some extra free time - it looks like it has some pretty neat information.
Screenshot | Demo
git clone https://github.com/joshuaferrara/SpaceX.gitcdinto thespacexdirectorynpm installnode server- The server should now be running locally on port 3000. Give it a few seconds to download and parse the data then navigate to http://localhost:3000/
- Express - NodeJS Web Server.
- Request - Allows for easier HTTP requests.
- Socket.io - Websocket library to transfer data between the NodeJS web server and the client web page
- xml2js - Parses the XML retrieved from the SSC into a javascript object.
- Google Maps