Hackathon day 4 & 5 - Roboto and the dragon
Now we have some content being Hoovered up and deposited into our own database we can start to look at how we're going to personalise the content for our users. We've decided to call the bit of software we're building to work this out: the Al Gore Rhythm.
Stee worked until 1am last night, battling with the font we'd chosen for the app: Roboto. It was adding an extra 2 seconds to the load time of the app which is far too much just for a font. We already know that the end of the week is a challenge for the app build - we're having to be ruthless with non-essential features and cut out the rest.
We now have a connection to a major retailer's product API which means we can pull in their product data without needing to user the Hoover. Here is a list of sites we've gathered data from so far:
- Threadless
- 8ball
- Artingko
- Headline shirts
We've added Highcharts to the web version of the app - this helps us understand what the Al Gore Rhythm is doing and which tags individual users are tending to prefer.
Today is apparently St George's day. If we had to choose an over-stretched metaphorical dragon to be slain then it would be: performance. Fortunately by the end of the day we'd made a 300% improvement in product load time. Go St George!
On Thursday afternoon we went to Talland Bay for a photoshoot because we wanted some original shots for the Garm promotional website that Matt was putting together. We got some great shots and you'll see more of them on the site soon. Jack brought his OneWheel, a motorised skateboard, which was great fun to use on a sandy beach.
Luke is taking the precaution of automatically copying images to Amazon S3 so we don't overload the retailers sites with traffic when the app is being used. I'm sure they'll be grateful for that...
We've finished content and photography for the Garm promotional website. That's now ready to go live when the app has been pushed live by Apple.
Stee's written 2,500 new lines of code this week which is quite a lot!
We've spent some time considering how we're going to refine the Al Gore Rhythm further. As far as possible, we'd like to make sure the user is always getting better results over time. We still need to figure our how to measure this, what the critera are and what variables we can tweak in order to try out improvements.
Excellent progress has been made this week and it's a very fine achievement for only 6 days. Next week we should be able to find some time to polish the app ready for it's first release. Meanwhile, we need to pack up all our gear, say goodbye to Polperro and drive back to Bristol. We might need a day or two to recover before monday...
The finished app
App Launch: Garm: Tinder for T-Shirts
Other days
Hackathon Day 1
Hackathon Day 2 & 3
