Pollen • MetLife Hackathon Winner

Allergies affect nearly a third of adults in the United States, yet most people are left guessing about their symptoms with little guidance on how to manage them day to day. Pollen is a first place national hackathon winner, judged by MetLife professionals, built to help fill that gap. It gives users personalized health recommendations based on their location by pulling real-time pollen index data through the Google Pollen, USPS Zipcode, and Geo Locator APIs, turning raw environmental data into actionable insights people can actually use. Under the hood I engineered a location-based data pipeline that resolves user coordinates to local pollen conditions, handling edge cases in geolocation to keep the experience smooth, and built a recommendation engine that cross-references real-time pollen levels to deliver advice that's actually relevant to where you are and what you're dealing with. This one was personal. I dealt with severe allergies myself during the development cycle, which kept me grounded in what actually matters to someone using the app. That experience shaped a lot of the decisions I made along the way. The app runs on Next.js and React on the frontend with Node.js powering the backend.