It's been a cold, coding Spring!

Hi all! Kim and Virginia here giving you an update on what we have been up to.

Virginia spent three months sciencing in cold, cold Antarctica.

 

Virginia on the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer seeing her first iceberg up close.

Kim spent three months coding in SwiftUI in her cold, cold basement.

 

Kim coding in her basement.

But now we are back together with working internet connections and moving forward! We have officially entered the app coding and watch sensor testing landscape. The watch has so far been thrown in the lake and a pool and we've gotten to a simplified app interface that lets users collect and then interact with data.

Learning to code in a new language starts really slow. I've spent hours agonizing over simple bugs. But as we fail, fix and learn, it's getting faster. We started with something that we could do: code something that is pretty, but not very functional:

 

Draft start page for the app where we figure out what kind of information we want to display to the user. We wrote a .JSON file with example data that the app can display. The weather data is from the .JSON, but the location is made by querying the GPS and getting a real-time fix. Next step, figure out how to query external servers and get weather in real-time!

Then we wrote something functional, but not very pretty.

 

It's just a simple list list of tests, but what you can't see is that we are building the backend where we take, store and read data in real-time.

The code is being built in parallel, smaller parts to reduce complexity, troubleshoot faster, and iterate more. These snippets will be the backbone of the final app. And we couldn't have started this without you all, the funding allowed Virginia and Kim to buy the computers and software to learn and make this code.

And finally I should mention that I've been nerding out over the capabilities of SwiftUI. It's REALLY, REALLY cool. It has algorithms for beautiful design and powerful data science. We just scratched the surface, but as creative scientists, we are excited to see all the possibilities.

We hope to give you some updates on data taken in the wild soon!