Breeze is based on simple idea: What is the best place to kite surfing in the Columbia River Gorge now and in the future? Our solution was to identify the ten most popular kite surfing span over 40 miles from The Dalles to Rooster Rocks. After converting these locations to lattitude and longitude coordinates our Node Express server makes queries to a third party API called Forecast.io.

The database that we are using for this project is Orchestrate.io. Under our free plan for Orchestrate, Forecast only allows us to make a thousand calls per day. Our solution was to have our server store the current weather data in a database. Orchestrate stores all of the weather data so that even if we were to get a million hits we would still not exceed the Forecast limits. Our server will update Orchestrate with the current weather conditions every 10 minutes during the day and every hour at night.

On the front end, our project is organized using Backbone. Backbone is a MV* frameworks that allows us to organize the weather data according to models, collections and views. Each page is a separate route so that the browser does not have to go back to the server for more data. All of the data for all of the views are downloaded all at once. Each route organizes and displays the data in a unique view.

Our main view is called the Table View which is a table that is sorted and color coded according the highest winds. The next view is called the location view which provides more detailed information about a specific location. The final view is a detailed view of a specific location that also includes both a weekly and a 48 hour forecast. The hourly forecast includes a D3 chart that allows the user to see how the wind will rise and fall over the next two days.

Research Club has monthly meetings, usually over brunch, where participants will stand up and give lightning talks about any subject that they are interested in. My project was to take advantage of the all information that is generated by the talks like videos, blog posts, images and social media and organize it in a way that makes easy it is to find, reference and access after the talk. It was important to the client that the site could be maintained by a untrained volunteer.

Before I was brought on to the project, the client had decided that they will build a new WordPress site and that the information related to the talks will be organized by a plugin called Pods. My job was to analyze and organize the way Research Club should present its information and find out the best to implement it in Pods. Over the course of the project, I gained a much deeper of understanding of how to organize posts and pages but also strategies to take advantage of templating within the WordPress hierarchy. Before starting the project I had only use WordPress for blogs, now I know how I can use Pods to organize complex sets of information and how to use the templates to make sure that it displays correctly.

As for skills that I developed, it is clear that I have much better and deeper understanding of WordPress. We were able to build a new database specific to the project needs on top of the existing WordPress structure. Because I was able to follow the schedule that we outlined at the beginning of the project, the project was delivered on time and on budget. As for Project Management, this was the first time that I used Basecamp on a relatively large, complex project and I found it to be a very useful tool in terms of organizing our discussions as well as tracking resources that might be implemented in the future.

Before this project, I had only been working on websites that I built from the ground up so I was happy to have the experience of coming on to a project midway through and discovering ways within my scope to make a positive contribution. I also liked that these talks were generating a lot of data and that it was my job to make that data accessible. The natural extension of this project would be ways to find out how the relationships between those data points might be visualized.

Research Club has monthly meetings, usually over brunch, where participants will stand up and give lightning talks about any subject that they are interested in.