Building a prototype

It took me about a week and a half to get the main application screen and get the basic plotting implemented.  I know because a week and a half after I got back from the AAS meeting I was on the plane headed out to NASA Goddard.  The trip was to help train a new staff member on our data server but I would also be pitching the mobile application to the project scientist.

One thing I was reminded of during that time is how effective and efficient you can be when you are really excited about what you are working on.  I was really excited about this project and wanted to pursue it and so I found myself very focused and working hard to get this done.  It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t let yourself get distracted.

While at Goddard, I had a chance to show the prototype as it existed to the scientist who I had worked on the design with as well as the project scientist.  Both of them liked what I had so far and the project scientist gave the green light for me to work on this officially and implement the full version.

I still had work to do on the prototype to fulfill it’s role as an exploratory tool for some of the techniques in building the app but it had fulfilled at least one of its main purposes as a demo tool.  In the end, the functionality of the prototype was expanded some what to include other things like notifications, automatic data updates, and pulling live data from our servers.  Especially in the latter case, it served as a test client to back end services that I needed to develop for the final applications but that that is the topic for another post.  But all along the way it was a tool to help me learn what was possible, what wasn’t, and how to implement those things.  And in the end, that was really its primary purpose which it fulfilled admirably.

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