Apps, Data, and the Benefit of a BA in English

My Launch Academy experience has been plagued with snowstorms!  We had 2 snow days in our first week, and in our second we're already slated for another crazy snowstorm hitting tonight.  It makes me wonder about the technology behind reporting storms.  There are so many weather apps to choose from, but I wonder where they're getting their data.  Wouldn't it be funny if everyone was using the same data, just presenting it in a slightly different way?  A huge part of whether your weather forecast will be accurate is whether or not your location services are accurate - and even if you have given the weather app your exact GPS positioning, if the nearest weather station that's taking measurements is blocks away, it won't matter at all.

Before I started studying programming, I would get frustrated with apps and their lack of features or poor implementations of what looked like the same features that everyone else had.  I assumed that apps were doing their own research (I had never heard of APIs) so I was amazed when a small team managed to amass so much data as well as create an app to present it.

It's comforting to know that, at least when I'm starting out, I don't have to be concerned with gathering data - I just need to present it in a new and organized way.  Even better is if I'm able to pull data from multiple sources, and present it all together.  For instance, a book app that lists every book in the Library of Congress could be interesting, but what if you cross-referenced them with Amazon and Barnes and Noble sales?  As an added layer, what if you threw in Amazon and Goodread's ratings?  You would end up with a much more interesting list of books than if you had simply read the first list from the Library of Congress.

This is where my BA in English comes into play.  So much of studying literature is pulling information from various sources and making sense of it on your own.  You can't just look at literature itself - you also have to cross-reference with the history of the period and the background of the author.  You could even look into what other literature was popular at the time.  An example of this would be any novel by Dickens - if you didn't know how he was being paid, you lose an important piece of the puzzle.  Comparing a Dicken's novel to a modern television show could prove an interesting and accurate comparison (seeing as he was paid by the installment, so his goal was to retain readership with each new section) whereas comparing with the conventions of modern movies would be inaccurate (although it could be argued that this is changing, with movie serials like the MCU.)

Now, when I see that a new service or app has come onto the market, I like to brainstorm where their data is coming from. Are they using the location services built into phones to provide accurate time measurements?  Is Google Maps sending me on circuitous routes so it has a measure for how long that particular route would take?  For that matter, does Google Maps base the time of a trip on the assumption that a driver will maintain speed limit the whole time (in the absence of traffic, of course) or do they assume that drivers will fluctuate their speed?

There's the added consideration of what would be efficient.  A map app could take in crazy amounts of various data, and calculate a route based on your favorite site-seeing locations, how much gas is left in your car, or how hungry you are likely to be at that time of day, but it would take a much longer time to calculate than if they simply used the given speed limits of local roads. 

You also have to consider how much data a user is willing to give you.  Going back to that amazing driving route filled with site-seeing, gas stations and restaurants - you would have to convince the user to give you so much data to make this accurate!  Seeing as it would be for a map app, you could assume to at least have location services.  The gas station necessity could probably be tracked by the frequency by which a person has previously visited gas stations, but this would mean persisting an amazing amount of data (taking you back to efficiency concerns.)  If you had access to a person's credit card purchases you could see at what times they like to visit restaurants (and, for that matter, if they prefer fine-dining or fast-food) but what user would give a map app access to their credit card data?

I seem to have gotten a little off track from my initial comment about snowstorms, but it's an interesting mental balancing act to think of an app that has user appeal, efficiency and operates on a logical amount of user-input.  As part of Launch Academy I need to design a "Breakable Toy"/capstone app project that takes all three of these things into consideration (as well as making my code appealing to a future employer!)  I'm still brainstorming, but I'm really excited about the prospects.