Hack day, Feb 2012: What we got up to
- A Featured Members Mashup: displaying a summary of featured members across multiple sites.
- Testing: We had a look at Hudson CI integration to assist us in running tests, as well as writing a load of Selenium tests for payments to assist in regression testing.
- Our PM team looked at ‘Chaos Theory’: drawing meaningful analysis from our project estimates so far.
- Message classification: Using machine learning to predict whether a message will be moderated as 'scammy'.
- Enhancing our desktop platform: An extension of the Encounters system to help matched members to organise real-life meetings using the Factual API, and some pretty incredible work to produce real-time notifications using node.js and socket.io (which won our People's Choice Award at the end of the day).
- Draw on map to search: Allowing members to select an area on a map to refine their searches.
- With our mobile platform and API now live for over a month, some of the team looked at mobile hacks: Implementing the Twilio API to generate SMS and voice notifications for private messages, and building a private messaging iPhone App to help members continue chatting on the move.
- A number of great visualisations covering the platform: Including an automatically updating heat map of member activity over the previous 24 hours, Global Warning; a 3D globe showing member activity in real time, and a 'today’s members' based visualisation.
- One of our UX team members produced a rather snazzy rapid HTML/CSS prototyping tool to streamline our mocking up process.
- Some of us explored our deployment process, producing a deployment dashboard, as well as graphing deploys and exceptions using Graphite and StatsD.
- A new Holiday Request system Rails app to make it easier to keep track of our holiday time and requests.
