The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak quickly spread around the
world, resulting in over 240 million infections and 4 million deaths by Oct
2021. While the virus is spreading from person to person silently, fear has
also been spreading around the globe. The COVID-19 information from the
Australian Government is convincing but not timely or detailed, and there is
much information on social networks with both facts and rumors. As software
engineers, we have spontaneously and rapidly constructed a COVID-19 information
dashboard aggregating reliable information semi-automatically checked from
different sources for providing one-stop information sharing site about the
latest status in Australia. Inspired by the John Hopkins University COVID-19
Map, our dashboard contains the case statistics, case distribution, government
policy, latest news, with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present
a participant's in-person observations in which the authors acted as founders
of https://covid-19-au.com/ serving more than 830K users with 14M page views
since March 2020. According to our first-hand experience, we summarize 9
lessons for developers, researchers and instructors. These lessons may inspire
the development, research and teaching in software engineer aspects for coping
with similar public crises in the future
