This is a submission for the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge
What I Built
In Nigeria today, insecurity and corruption is a very big issue with no hope in sight of solving it as they both go in tandem. I have been in multiple situations where I wished I could contact emergency services as soon as possible but to no avail. Also, to be honest when I started this project in 2025, the goal was to provide a very simple way to combat corruption by turning even the layman into a watchful vigilante. So, the goal of this project was to prototype a simple system called "Eagle Eye" that will allow you to make reports to the appropriate authorities about corruption and any insecurity in an area.
I really hope to make this platform or website actually grow into a nationwide tool complete with an admin dashboard and a response team. I took massive inspiration from the London underground railway system: "see something, say something".
Demo
Live link: https://ifeanyi-eagle-eye.netlify.app/home
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/MasterIfeanyi/Eagle-Eye-App
The Comeback Story
The project was previously using Firebase before and I racked up a bill of $180 which hurt massively, so I decided to re-write it using Nextjs and MongoDB, and my assistant of choice was GitHub Co-pilot. I chose Nextjs and MongoDB because Nextjs to me feels like a full-stack option with a built-in /api folder and MongoDB Atlas is a free database service that I could use to store reports and perform authentication of users. Along the way I decided to add a page where you could get phone number of emergency services. If not for this hack-a-thon, I may have never come back to this project because I have been putting it off for some time as I am was busy.
My Experience with GitHub Copilot
Building Eagle Eye was not a smooth process. There were moments where the project felt completely stuck, and honestly, GitHub Copilot was a massive part of that process, as I primarily write Nextjs, but Co-pilot guided me and took away my fears. GitHub Copilot helped me think through the architecture from the ground up, guiding decisions like how to structure the Next.js app directory, how to handle authentication with JWT and cookies, and how to connect the frontend to MongoDB. When I hit bugs, like a broken scroll on the hotlines page, a sticky header that refused to stick, or a location detector pulling the wrong city, GitHub Copilot did not just hand me answers. It explained why things were breaking so I actually understood the fix. What I appreciate most is that GitHub Copilot treated me like a developer who was learning, not one who needed things done for them. This project genuinely would not exist in its current state without that support. Although, I was limited to the Claude Haiku 4.5 model (free plan), I feel like it was sufficient enought to help me.
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