RecTheTrail is getting a makeover, internally and externally!
About a month ago, I found that the site was inexplicably down for the count. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, but I decided that given that, it was finally time to implement some of the changes that I had been thinking about for almost two years.
In short, I've learned so much in the past two years through my professional work and wanted to bring that to RecTheTrail. From backend to UI/UX to machine learning to code quality and readability, I've learnt a ton and would be remiss not to make the necessary updates to this app.
For starters, I've been meaning to pull the app off of AWS and move everything over to Google Cloud. I'd recently become aware of GCP through my current job and now have a strong preference for it over AWS. I never found AWS to be particularly intuitive, whereas GCP was not only more intuitive, but I felt there was a GCP service for every aspect of my app.
Code quality also needed a facelift. I learned so much about code quality in my first month at MetaBrite alone, that I was horrified at my code in this project. Along the same lines, git repo structure and best practices for code commitment issues - why didn't I know anything about that at the time. Oh right, because I was learning 10,000 things at once.
On the front end, I knew from the get go that work was eventually going to have to be done on my site. Especially the recommendation landing page. I'm not a UI/UX person or a web developer by training, so I gave myself some passes on some things that I knew were issues initially. But after having to explain how to use the page over and over again to people I was showing it to, I feel that I need to incorporate those changes into this revamp.
Finally, more features will be coming with RecTheTrail 2.0! I want to play around with some of the GCP ML APIs but there should be some features using those and automate hazard warning for hikes that the site recommends.
Its going to be a fair bit of work, so I don't expect that the site will be up again too soon (I am afterall, fully employed with a social life), but I'm hoping to role out the site again by Fall 2018. Until then, happy hiking!