Daily Updates

October 26, 2024

I worked a total of 6 hours today: 3 hours of work, 1-hour block for lunch and updating my phone to Android 15, and another 3 hours of work.

In the first work session, I wrote a function that calculates the phases of each day in a cycle using 3 data points: (1) the cycle's start date; (2) the cycle's end date; and (3) the cycle's period length. I also used cycle length as a data point, but this was calculated from the difference between the cycle's start and end dates.

ChatGPT gave me a good start on this function—there were no overlaps between phases—and I only had to edit the code to be type-safe. I also wrote functions to format these calculations for database insertion. However, I did not check if my code will stand the test of daylight savings; I'll check on it once I'm done with other functionalities.

In my second work session, I finished up the symptoms tracking feature. This was easy to work on (thanks to what I've done in the first work session), so most of my time went to testing. I struggled mostly with small features, like "jumping" to today's date in the Flatlist when you click on an icon in the top right corner of the screen.

With the pull request created, merged, and closed, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. But a considerable amount of weight is still here: I haven't started on the Health Insights, Calendar, and Suggestions ("Hormonoscope") features, which are features I consider most important.

At the same time, these important features wouldn't be possible if there was no way for the user to record their cycle or their symptoms. So... I won't dwell too much on what I'm left with, and instead I'll focus on getting Health Insights completed (pull request created, merged, and closed) by Friday. It won't be easy since I'll have to learn how to integrate a charting library and wrangle with data, but it'll be worth it!

October 29, 2024

In 1 hour at a Shut Up & Write session, I worked on drafting the front page of my writeup and adding relevant screenshots. I also started tinkering with automatic citation generation in Biblatex and managed to get it working within ~2 hours the afternoon.

I have a mid-semester submission deadline on Saturday, November 2.

In my submission for this deadline, I intend to include:

Scientific justifications of my intended app features
A plan for how I will conduct user testing and feedback
Descriptions for all of the concepts (known as "HCs" and "LOs") I'm applying to the project

If I accomplish this, I will be ~60% done with my writeup and ~50% done with the app. The remaining 40% of my writeup would include descriptions of user testing results, a discussion on limitations, as well as potential go-to market plans. The remaining 50% of my app (before I submit it for publishing on the Play Store) would include Google Calendar integration, lifestyle suggestions, as well as refining the small details of the app, e.g. re-calculating the average length of the past 3 cycles whenever a new cycle is entered, allowing editing and deletion of a cycle, notifications to track symptoms for the day, and so on.

(I also have an assignment due on November 1, so I will try to prioritize the writeup to-dos (i.e. the first three bullet points in the list above) before that. Fingers crossed.)

October 31, 2024

Happy Halloween!

In 2 hours, I managed to draft a timeline and an approximate plan for how I will conduct user testing and feedback for my app. I took another 1.5 hours to draft the HCs and LOs I'm applying for the project before breaking for lunch.