Sprint 5 – Robot Uprising

First things first! We’re in the Alpha stores! 🥳🥳

Exciting right? But what does that actually mean?

So right now, the original Council team can install the app on their phones and break it to their heart’s content.

The app is like the first iteration, what will happen now is every sprint I will upload a new version, they will give me feed back and we’ll move closer and closer towards a final product.

Previously on my descent into madness:

1. Precursor
2. Sprint 1 – The Foundations
3. Sprint 2 – The ummm Foundations?
4. Sprint 2 – Nerd Ramble
5. Sprint 3 – Cooking with matches!
6. Sprint 4 – Now We’re Cooking With Gas!
7. Sprint 5 – Robot Uprising
8. This Is Not the Sprint You’re Looking For
9. Sprint 6 – That’s a Weird Looking Patronus
10. Sprint 7 – Corona Stole My Title
11. Sprint 8 – Adventure Time!
12. Sprint 9 – Now In Technicolor
13. Sprint 10 – Refinement
14. Sprint 11 – Motion In The Ocean
15. Alpha Release 1.0.3
16. Sprint 12 – No Rest For The Wicked
17. Alpha Release 1.0.4
18. Sprint 13 – I Need a Break
19. Alpha Release 1.0.5
20. Sprint 14 – Just James Things
21. Sprint 15 – Wearing My Heart On My Sleeve
22. Alpha Release 1.0.6
23. Sprint 16 – Warm Up
24. Alpha Release 1.0.7
25. Sprint 17 – Coffee’s back on the menu!
26. Alpha Release 1.0.8
27. Sprint 18 – We’re on fire!
28. Sprint 19 – Slowly fast
29. Sprint 20 – Let’s get Nerdy
30. Alpha Release 1.0.9
31. Sprint 21 – We’re back!
32. Alpha Release 1.1.0
33. Sprint 22 – You Look Cute Today
34. Alpha Release 1.1.1
35. Sprint 23 – Sausage Smuggler
36. A SoSa Retrospective
37. Sprint 25 – I am SoSa and don’t call me Shirley
38. Sprint 26 – The best laid schemes of mice and men
39. Sprint 27 – Vogue, Strike a Pose
40. Sprint 28 – a New Hope
41. I Couldn’t Think Of a Title
42. Guess who’s back, Back again!
43. Demolition Man
44. Squid James
45. I AM STILL ALIVE
46. We Didn’t Choose This Life, We’re Just Living In It
47. Let’s go!

Stats!

Our LinkedIn grew by 25 bringing us to 115 followers, Instagram grew from 66 to 74 and our Beta list also grew by 14, bringing us to 245!

I’m really happy with the progress of these, the numbers aren’t huge but they’re all going in the right direction and most importantly they’re natural!

Our domain and page authority have stayed the same again for the second sprint running, but we are seeing an increase in links and number of linking domains.

Last sprint, we saw Webmaster tools metrics to date (since November) from this sprint on, i’ll share the stats based on the last sprint. As you can see… there’s a lot of work to do here…

Game Night

The next one is Sunday the 8th of March, 1900-2100 GMT and we’ll be playing Garry’s Mod, Murder!

You can grab a free ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sosa-plays-murder-garrys-mod-tickets-96395819491

If you don’t have the game don’t worry! If you’re a regular in the community just give me a shout and i’ll give you a copy of the game. You just need steam + PC.

Design Updates

Although the app is still very basic, I wanted to make sure what the alpha team saw was at-least usable so I took what we had last sprint, changed buttons to icons, added a slide out navigation bar and generally added some nice little UI hints.

It’s still ugly as sin – but it’s a step in the right direction!

Styled Messages

You might also remember last sprint, we had it showing messages but with all the weird HTML tags. 

That’s not the best looking thing in the world if you actually want to read the messages so i’ve added some HTML parsing. 

HTML parsing basically takes all that gobbledegook and converts it into something that looks eligible to the end user!

Bot uprising

It was only a matter of time really wasn’t it?  I’m sorry it’s come to this, it’s all my fault! The bots have taken over…

Ok seriously though, it’s not that bad. Chat rooms and servers can be difficult to test when there aren’t many people using it. 

This Sprint, I’ve built a very basic Bot framework and bot spawner too!

To fuel the bots lust for voices, I’ve taken a small chunk of some really old, public chat logs (circa 2014), anonymised all the usernames and tags and things and pumped it through the bot framework which creates individual connections to the chat server and talks exactly as people would have spoken in 2014!

A total of 20,000 messages, averaging every 5 seconds and and 273 bots spawned concurrently.

The server is barely breaking a sweat, and the client seems to handle it just fine.

This is great news at this stage and gives us a solid baseline to performance test with going forward.

The only downside is… i’ve coded something wrong and well… you can see the results (this is real time)

Prague!

Last but not least, I flew out to Prague to meet Danda and OneLatte. I had a lot of fun, we saw some great places like the Bone Chapel, Sex Mueseum and even the apple mueseum! 

It was so much fun meeting them both, and eating so much amazing food. I hope I’ll get to meet more members over the coming months

I’ve uploaded an album to imgur of some pictures I took if you’re interested!

Unofficial SoSa meet

That’s all folks!