Saturday, October 3, 2009

Hopping Along

We've been quiet lately, as far as letting everyone knowing what we're up to, it's about time to clue everyone in.

I'm Kenny, the fingers behind the bulk of the code on Trip Hopping. In August I traveled though Mexico, mostly by thumb, in the few weeks I was there I didn't write a single line of code for Trip Hopping. I flew to Phoenix and stayed with Larry, also from Trip Hopping, and started getting cracking on code and operations again.

I've since gone up to California where I've been somewhat stationary for longer than I usually do (I've been living out of my backpack over 2 years spending an average of 3 or 4 days in one spot). Despite being along up here, as far as people working on Trip Hopping, I've brewed a beer in the spirit of Trip Hopping brews; a brew is what we call our concentrated efforts of improving our project, usually with volunteers. It's a porter, a week or so away from being drinkable.

Anyhow, I'm in California coding. Specifically, I've put a lot of hours into improving, and extending, our rideshare search algorithm, for one. I've been making it able to search more rideshare sites, and sort the information better. For example, we now search couchsurfing.org's local city groups for posting that we sense are people offering rides, and show these in our results, it's friggin' awesome. It's also now scalable, meaning we can easily start searching many of the premier rideshare sources, beyond just rides posted on our site.

Larry is the couchsurfing ambassador of Phoenix and Arizona, on the Trip Hopping team. He's taking care of our verification process. At the moment our hang up is finding a better provider for the patches and bumper stickers we want to send to every verified member, soon we'll be sending these out.

Besides this, a lot of general tweaks have been going out to increase speed, but also a design change that should make things more clear and easy to find. Keep on tripping all, enjoy!

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