A non tech summary

An Astrology App where users can find their Sun and Rising signs.

Watch the demo video below

Non technical overview

This was the first react app I created from scratch--other than your run of the mill to-do list. It was the first app that I created because I I wanted a job at Co-Star Astrology or to make an comparable app to what they had but better!! Or simply more stylish than Astrology Cafe (no shade).

Technical Overview

In a one-week Sprint, I developed an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with 2 main features--sun sign and rising sign retrieval. I had so much fun creating this app but creating astrology apps is way harder than I had imagined!

Features

MVPs usually require adding one feature, but I added more than one.

1. Users could add their birthdate and birth times.
2. Users could retrieve their sun sign--the sign that most people already know and is determined just by your birthday.
3. Users could retrieve their rising sign--which requires knowing your birth time and is not something everyone knows.
4. Upon pressing the submit button users received a description of their sun sign.

Challenges

So creating this app helped me to develop a lot more respect for astrologers--even though astrology was already a hobby of mine. My goal was actually to be able to retrieve the full chart of each user, which includes the sun and the rising sign (which I was able to calculate on my own) the moon, along with astrological placements of all the planets including Pluto--for example my Mercury is in Aquarius, according to Co-Star and Astrology Cafe.

This goal turned out to be way more challenging to achieve than I had imagined.

In order to calculate the placement of a user's planets and moon, I would have needed an ephemeris API which costs a lot more money than I had access to. I could have also entered in data manually using ephemeris from a Farmer's Almanacs. But entering the data for millions of birth times and places would have required more time than I have left on this earth--it already required about 400 lines of code to calculate the sun and rising signs. In future, I would love to have access to an ephemeris API or utilize an equation that could retrieve the placement of the users planets utilizing the longitude, latitude, and time and date of the user's birth. I would also love to figure out how to shorten the code to fewer lines of code.

Another important issue to add is that the way I calculated the rising sign was my using a chart that I found online that said that rising signs change every two hours. While ising signs ideally change every 2 hours, the further you are from the equator, the less this becomes true. In certain parts of the world, signs do stay in the astrological placements for about two hours. Some stay for about three hours. Some stay for about one hour. Because of this, the app was not 100% accurate when calculating the rising sign. In the future, access to an ephemeris API would mitigate these inaccuracies.

If you are interested in seeing my atrology app improve and have the money to fund this project or would like to hire me to work on your already existing or future astrology app, feel free to email me using the email address below.