Lambda Labs Complete
What is Labs?
Labs projects at Lambda are 2-month long sprints meant to simulate a real internship at another company. Some projects within Labs roleplay projects in an organization while some projects are actual companies in the US that take on Lambdas’ students to make contributions. The project my group was assigned was a web app named “Citrics”.
The Final Problem
Part of what makes Citrics so useful is the predictive data that’s given to the user regarding the future of rental prices or climate in a particular city.
The problem we were facing at the start of this month was, “What was the most effective way to display this data?”. For about a week and a half, the Front-end and Data Science team brainstormed and experimented with multiple ways to display predictive data meaningfully. We tried bar charts & line graphs, but the axis’ of those visualizations proved to be not feasible for front-end styling purposes. Especially when the user had to compare 3 cities.
Keep It Simple Stupid
Turns out, that the solution was agreed upon was the most simple. The Data Science team would get all the information that would be useful to the front-end (i.e. # of rooms, prices, years). Store that data in JSON format in a single endpoint, and then we took that information from the JSON response and displayed it in a table.
This gave us 2 valuable improvements:
- We had exponentially more freedom when it came to styling the table both for our team, and the future teams that take on this codebase.
- More flexibility in styling meant more flexibility in spacing. We were able to successfully display the table with up to 3 cities being compared.
Mission Accomplished
We made it to the end. Our requirements during release cycle 2 were that users should be able to search for cities based on user preferences, and the users can see predictive data of statistics such as rent price, and climate.
What is next?
We have completed documentation of our code for the next Labs team to come in and improve on the foundation we built. Now we just need to document via video what we accomplished for the world (and employers) to see!
