

Show HN: Website 181 Took Way Longer Than a Day – YumHacker - jenniferDewalt
http://yumhacker.com/

======
izolate
I think the greatest thing you learned on your 180 website trip was how to
deliver. You've cultivated a habit of finishing projects and shipping them
through the door. No matter how good a developer you are, that in itself is
invaluable.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
It was actually a little overwhelming when I first started working on
YumHacker. I conditioned myself to have a final product at the end of the day.
In the first few days of working on YumHacker I had to keep telling myself
that I was working on the order of finishing features not websites. :)

------
pbreit
Need a one sentence description towards the top. Otherwise I have no idea what
the site does.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Good point. I probably need to think about a more optimized landing in the
coming weeks.

~~~
jcutrell
Just pop in the title you're using for the page - Find Restaurants Endorsed by
People You Trust. That's the powerful tag that's missing. It feels like Yelp
on initial landing, but the "you trust" part gets me hooked.

------
dredmorbius
Context: "Hi! I'm Jennifer Dewalt and I am making 180 websites in 180 days.
You can follow the project here and on the blog."

[http://jenniferdewalt.com/](http://jenniferdewalt.com/)

------
mattholtom
She's back!

Nice job, Jennifer. The one place I think the 180 previous helped you build
massive skill is in UI design. Simple and snappy.

What are you using for geo-coding and mapping? I've found a combination of
"geocoder" and "gmaps-for-rails" gems work great.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thank you! I totally agree with you on the 180 websites project really helping
with understanding UI design.

I'm using the Google Maps Javascript API for the maps and RGeo as a wrapper
for PostGIS/Postgres.

~~~
mattholtom
Cool, nothing wrong with going to the bare metal for Gmaps in simple
applications. If you find yourself doing any complex marker or polygon
manipulation Gmaps-for-rails is really worth a look.

Keep up the good work, look forward to more from you in the future!

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Awesome! I will definitely check it out.

------
josephjrobison
Awesome job! I agree with your opinion on Yelp being imperfect for specific
tastes, since it's all aggregate. What's your plan for gaining users, and
getting to that critical mass?

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thanks! Learning how to grow a product is part of the next steps for me.
Figuring out how to provide value before a user has a ton of friends on the
site is important. One thought I've had is making featured lists from notable
food critics for example.

~~~
thinkdevcode
Awesome job finishing the site! On a personal note I spend a lot of time
eating out, especially at really great restaurants (5 star) all over Miami and
Fort Lauderdale, FL. I would love to start adding restaurants, comments, etc.
to this app but there is no real "push" for me to do that. Maybe some
gamification? Points/rewards/mentions/etc. so that I feel like i'm gaining
something by contributing? Just a thought. There may be other people who feel
the same way

~~~
jenniferDewalt
That is an excellent point and something I've been thinking about as well. One
thought I've had is adding some sort of rating system where people who are
active on the site get promoted as 'Awesome people who have good taste'
(working title). I'm also thinking about ways to make the site more useful on
a personal level.

~~~
stevesearer
Hi Jennifer, I really like the site, but I'm wondering if there is any way to
add more restaurants?

Santa Barbara has a lot of great places, but I'm only seeing a few to choose
from :)

~~~
jenniferDewalt
There is a way to add restaurants! Under the main search field in the header
is a link to Search for a Restaurant. Enter the name of a restaurant and the
location and YumHacker will return a list of possible matches. Endorsing a
restaurant and it will be added to the database.

~~~
stevesearer
ah perfect, I thought I had tried that, but I guess not :) Thanks!

------
Tycho
Jennifer, since embarking on these website projects and publicising them, have
you had much attention from recruiters for tech companies? (just curious.
totally understand if you'd rather keep that info to yourself)

Good job on site 181. Great brand name - but I agree with the person who said
a short description at the top would help.

------
WriteYourRep
Great stuff, very clean and intuitive UI. Can you make the map scroll down the
page as I scroll down?

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thanks! That's a great suggestion. Adding it to my to-do list.

------
elwell
Like the crisp and quick ux. You might want to adjust the line-height for the
business names because two line names seem to have too much spacing
vertically; you'll need to adjust the line-height for the entire li first I
think because of the way the css is set up.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thanks! Good call on the line-heights. I hadn't noticed how weird those
multiline business names look.

------
mutagen
Awesome! Your journey is quite inspirational as well.

There's some weirdness remembering locations I search for before I sign up and
across the boundary when it asks me for a signup but works great once I've
logged in.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thanks! It has been a really fun ride.

There's still a lot to be done with the sign up/sign in process that I haven't
gotten to yet. Saving the last search is at the top of that to do list.

~~~
glittershark
Have you considered open sourcing it to get the development flowing? I for one
would love to hop in on this website in particular and get hacking

~~~
jenniferDewalt
The code is publicly available on GitHub
([https://github.com/jendewalt/yumhacker](https://github.com/jendewalt/yumhacker))
but I hadn't thought about opening up as an open source project. Definitely
something I'll consider!

------
minimaxir
So how long did it take?

~~~
jenniferDewalt
About 80 days.

~~~
jqueryin
It's exciting to see how much your skills have improved over the course of the
half year. I guess this proves a point that added complexity and learning new
technology drastically adds to development time for those still learning to
program. Also couple this with no extensive amount of development under their
belt.

Not to hijack this thread and solely to prove a point, take for example my
startup weekend project. Just this weekend (Saturday and Sunday 9AM-9PM) I
built CarePrice which utilizes geolocation, a backend api, user management
system and authentication, frontend, accompanying social networking,
additional pages, and the full gamut. Albeit I did have a little help, I'd
attribute 90% of the development work to myself on this one.

[http://www.careprice.co](http://www.careprice.co)

It's this ease of development you can look forward to with more experience
under your belt! Keep on hacking and the days just start to shave off.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
That is awesome! Now that I've gone through the whole process I'm definitely
much fast than I was when I started YumHacker. I spent a lot of time in the
beginning just trying to wrap my head around what the heck I was doing,
especially with Backbone.

------
matthuggins
Website 181 of what?

~~~
chavesn
"180 websites in 180 days" \-
[http://jenniferdewalt.com/](http://jenniferdewalt.com/)

------
ommunist
Awesome. But if this will inspire freshmen to make website per day, we'll be
flooded. But I am sort of happy if that will happen.

------
valtron
I can see this being much better than Yelp. How are you doing the
recommendations? Something along the lines of PageRank?

~~~
jenniferDewalt
So far the site is based on location and what the people you're following have
endorsed. In the future, results could also be ordered by things like number
of endorsers, photos or comments.

------
ToastyMallows
It's not finding me by current location, it drops me in the map at what looks
like Coords 0,0 in the Pacific Ocean.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Sorry about that! Probably not too many restaurants there to endorse. Thanks
for letting me know. I'll look into it.

~~~
nobodysfool
Same here. Even when I put in my zipcode, it's not finding me and dropping me
at 0,0. The name of my location shows up correctly in the search box, but it
returns no results and drops me in the ocean. I can scroll around the map and
zoom into my city, but it finds no results.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Hm, I think I understand the problem. Back to the code to see if I can track
it down. :)

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Ok, figured it out! Should be all fixed now.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
There probably aren't any restaurants in the database near your location. When
you search for a specific restaurant, YumHacker checks it's database as well
as querying the Google Places API to look for matches. If you endorse a
restaurant, it will get saved in the database and it will appear on the map
when you search nearby.

This is a UX problem I'll have to think about going forward.

------
hardxxxtarget
The UI is pretty amazing. But why do the body tags appear empty when I see the
view source?

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thanks! The front end uses Backbone.js so most of the content is rendered with
Javascript. The backend uses Rails as an api which on page load sends along a
barebones html doc for Backbone to latch on to and work its magic. You can
check out the source code on GitHub -
[https://github.com/jendewalt/yumhacker](https://github.com/jendewalt/yumhacker)

~~~
hardxxxtarget
Thanks Jennifer. Btw, how did you manage to build 180 websites in 180 days. I
mean what was your inspiration to conquer the streak?

~~~
jenniferDewalt
I wanted to learn to code but I'd never really done any coding before. I came
up with the 180 websites idea as a way to start really small and stay
motivated. It wasn't always easy but I had a blast and learned a lot.

------
vonseel
This is awesome. Where do you pull data for something like this?

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thanks! For the maps and location data I'm using the Google Maps Javascript
API. For the restaurant data, I'm querying the Google Places API from Rails.

------
jasonlotito
181 shipped projects now. Damn, that's impressive.

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thanks! It's been a crazy year. :)

------
danso
Thanks for sharing Jennifer. Congrats on this and your past 180 app streak...I
was wondering if, after being able to be away from the daily grind, you
changed up how you built and structured your app? That is, what were the
architectural lessons you learned after 180 days of getting-things-done-(even
if not always best practices) that you could apply on your longer term
projects?

~~~
jenniferDewalt
Thank you! I spent a lot more time thinking about what I was actually doing
while making YumHacker. There is definitely a time for just hacking things
together to get something that works but sometimes it's worth taking the time
to carefully think through the mechanics and do it right. It took time for me
to learn Backbone and set up a good system for using it but it saved me a ton
of time (and headaches) in the long run.

