Nightwatch

Quest briefing

Nightwatch finds the safest way to walk home at night, not only the shortest. We built it at CUMSA Hacks, where it placed Top 5. Try the live demo.

• Built a FastAPI backend that computes safest and shortest routes. It scores paths by streetlight density from Ottawa Open Data.
• Designed Pydantic schemas with nested models and validation. They enforce the API contract and reject malformed requests at the boundary.
• Added pytest contract tests with FastAPI's TestClient (backend/tests). They check that the health and route-compare endpoints return the agreed response shape.

Loot (what was learned)

• Open municipal data is useful, but the hard part is normalizing it into something routable.
• Schema-first API design catches whole classes of bugs before any route logic runs.
• At a hackathon, one finished feature beats five half-built ones.