blackrimglasses.com

Sometimes you need to scratch an itch.

I left my job at the end of January and while I’ve enjoyed the time off, I wanted to take the opportunity while I had it to expand my horizons technically. For the past five years at Warners I was neck deep in Drupal, as Drupal powered most of our Platform. I also did some exploration into Python, Node and Rails.

Seeing as I had some downtime to do something for fun rather than any business need, I decided to give myself the challenge to make a mashup in Rails.

I have been toying around with Rails since pre-Version 1 beta. I never really took it seriously or considered it to power the WBR platform because at the time it wasn’t mature enough. Since Version 3 came out however I’ve been looking at it with some interest as it addresses a lot of the deficiencies from versions 1 and 2, and presents, to me, a much more refined workflow than Drupal.

Concertgram is not great, but its something I wanted to do to scratch an itch. I wanted to see photos taken at shows, without having to rely on people checking into the events on Foursquare. As such it gets the longitude/latitude of a show from Songkick, gets the timezone for the show from AskGeo, then uses both to query Instagram for photos taken within +/- 4 hours of the show, and 500m from its location.

Not super complicated at all.

User interface wise I wanted to explore simplicity and fluidity. I’m by no means a designer, so I also wanted to avoid images and work with CSS3. Mostly however I wanted to throw myself into a project to learn some new things, refresh myself on other things (i.e., JQuery, CSS) and just to code.

A few things I learned during this, some of which warrant more discussion:

• Maintaining proper Git workflow and deployment strategies is much simpler in Rails than in Drupal. Drupal conflates a lot of things into the database, which makes maintainability very difficult. I know that things are moving away from that.
• The combination of Github, Pow and Dotcloud make for ease of rapid iteration.
• There are many ways to skin the asynchronous user interface pattern cat.
• API’s are unpredictable
• Dealing with timezones sucks
• In dense urban environments, you get a lot of collateral Instagrams from around the venue
• Instagram isn’t as popular as I suspected, at least at shows

At some point Concertgram will reach a point of completion and I’ll stop iterating it, but for now it’s a bit of fun. I do have in mind a more complicated Rails app to make good on my promise.

PS: Concertgram isn’t currently in a public Github repo due to API keys in it. However if anyone that is a Rails expert wants to give it a once over to critique the code, please let me know.