Big or small, tough or easy, well made or dangling by a thread… here they are

I think its important to build in public

• You can track your progress going way back. Feels good!
• Other people can see that not everything I’ve built is amazing and polished. It was all a learning experience
• It wouldn't be healthy to only value the things that turned out great. Honouring missteps is part of growing?

Library Occupancy Tracker

https://library.tomasmaillo.com/

Shows how busy the Main Library of the University of Edinburgh is. Trying to predict how busy it will be in the future too!

Aside from the data aspect, I also loved playing around with colors and animated svgs to show data. I made my own data to SVG graph mini library :)

Reception

Got to more than 300 weekly unique users just by word of mouth. I even got recognised on campus several times just from this website!

iOS Shortcut

By popular demand I also released an iOS shortcut that could be installed directly from the website! When triggered, it would query my servers to see daily predictions on how busy the library is.

Screen Recording 2023-02-13 at 18.28.58.mov

Postmortem:

This project is very much well and successful! It serves a purpose and there is a solid user base. One of the biggest issues was gathering the data and trying to reach out to the university to allow that. Thats the lesson, don’t underestimate how hard it could be to get third parties to collaborate on something. Regardless of this speedbump turned out amazingly!

Update:

Data endpoint from the university has been shut down! No new data is flowing to the website. I reach-out to the people in charge and schedule several meetings. They told me the system has been changed completely and they do not have the bandwidth to re enable the endpoint :(