Geocart

Built for Proteção a Desastres (Disaster Protection), a Brazilian civic tech initiative for emergency response coordination. The system tracks geographic locations and their status in real time: OK, WARNING, or CRITICAL. Field workers send updates, alerts propagate to connected clients, and an AI chatbot handles coordination queries.

The Architecture

A Django REST Framework backend with Pusher for real-time events. Status updates flow from the API through Pusher WebSocket channels to a React Native (Expo) mobile app. The chatbot relay sits on top: messages go to a chatbot.com integration, the bot replies via webhook, and the reply gets pushed to the originating client’s Pusher channel.

Mobile client → POST /api/chat → chatbot.com
                                    ↓ (async webhook)
                              POST /api/messages
                                    ↓
                              Pusher.trigger(session_id, ...)
                                    ↓
                              Client receives reply

The backend also supports login by phone number or username, a custom auth backend on top of Django’s standard auth system.

The Stack

• Django 2.2 + Django REST Framework
• Pusher.io for real-time events
• chatbot.com + Blip for AI relay
• JWT auth (djangorestframework-simplejwt)
• Docker + Heroku via GitLab CI
• React Native (Expo) mobile client

Current State

Prototype. The core domain works (places, status updates, news entries, chatbot relay), but it was built fast and shows it: hardcoded credentials, no tests, Django 2.2 which has been EOL since 2022. Sitting in the resurrection queue when there’s time to clean it up properly.