TANDEM Week 14

WEEK 14 (Can it really be?)
TANDEM PROJECT UPDATE:

Presses have rolled (to some extent). Word of mouth is spreading and will only grow. The launch is upon us and we are ready to go.

Friday Chris and Jojo presented at the GC Digital Initiative’s Media Res #1. It was exciting to see TANDEM rolling with the NYCDH crowd. Not only were useful contacts made in the other presenters, but it gave us a chance to see how our final presentation should go. In under five minutes, Chris was able to describe the basic objectives and accomplishments and the proto-website easily stood up to the standard of the other presentations (even as a definite pre-rollout version). Chris also got first hand experience with areas that need more or less explaining. Optimizing 10 speaking minutes will be a challenge, but it was a productive and constructive exercise to give it a dry run. It also allowed the team to make more focused and concise presentation slides.

Thanks to tips from Tim Owens and Zach Davis, we have fixed the bug that was causing unpredictable results. The bug meant that some users would experience a session crash (unhandled error), others would go through all the steps and get back an empty result set, while still other users would get results with other project results inexplicably mixed in. The solution was based on the ‘aha!’ realization that the web is a stateless environment and that the programmer must take steps to ensure that a session across multiple requests and responses remains a single logical whole. The way to do that is to use anonymous cookies to identify the session and store the project-id in that cookie. Using the project-id, the program looks up in the database all the information required including the location of the files and folders in use for that project. There is no doubt that we have achieved our MVP and it is a good reliable user experience. There is a tiny bit of styling left to be done and the program is finished as far as version 0.5.

Give it a try!