Project Update: OOTD (Recent Developments)

Progress has picked up again on OOTD, with several key milestones achieved over the past few weeks. For those unfamiliar, OOTD is a Blogging platform, mashing together short form/ephemeral micro blogging, long form written content and the killer feature of acting like inventory management system for your wardrobe, giving daily insights on trends and how you use your wardrobe. All that while giving users the tools to shape their public profile and posts the way they want, encouraging individual creativity.

1. Prototype Development and Feature Branch Cleanup

Around 16 days ago, I returned to work on the font-end finishing work I started two months ago and cleaning up some scratch files:

• Feed Outfit post prototyping: I finished off the prototype styling for outfit posts as they appear in the feed.
  It’s important to mention right now I don’t have a design document for the front-end I’m just placing elements in the page with the plan of implementing a design document later.
• CSRF Token Implementation: I started to implement CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) tokenisation, including creating honeypots and detection/logging.
• User Serialisation Fixes: Another commit focused on fixing user serialisation, ensuring that user data is handled correctly and securely.

2. Building the Profile Page

Then I started work on the user Profile system architecting how Profile setting and status work including how Users are referenced and Profile is delivered.

I then created the initial layout for the profile taking into account that it might change in the future and hopefully users will be able to customise their own Profile.

3. Introducing the Post Components

Next I moved onto populating the profile and building the three Post types that are core to the platform.

• Blogs: First I foresaw several challenges many from considering technical debt and scope. I have lots of Ideas I’d like to include in the blogging system the main one being the ability to include outfits and Garments from the platform and there are a tonnes of decisions to make for a feature like that: how do you manage public states if Users can privatise outfits and Garments, integration with the WYSIWYG and the WYSIWYG it’s self needs a whole decision and consideration process.
• Outfits: The front-end for the Outfits I took the prototypes I built earlier and baked that layout into the component. I then decided that I didn’t have a clear enough vision for the User creation part of the system and put together a basic form.
• Garments: I started building out the database architecture for Garments and that’s where I encountered by biggest decision making struggle. Clothing sizes are a totally confusing mess and the way most e-commerce software solve this is by having the sizes tied to the item then merging on name and category for the search. This wouldn’t work here because Users are uploading the Garments and that would become messy.

I finished off this section by starting to create the system for users to switch and make posts, after some of the challenges I faced I decided place some elements in the component to get some motivation and come back to it when I’m ready to commit to certain conventions.

4. Where marketing meets engineering (Invite system)

Setting out expectations and mitigations. I have little expectations for this project to “take off” and would be very happy if it was just me and my friends that ever use it. However nothing is more classic Marketing than exclusivity, not only does that have the potential to create buzz it also intentionally limits the throughput of new users and should hopefully avoid the disaster situation of the site falling over or a huge bill.

What’s Next for OOTD?

I’m very pleased with the progress I’m currently making, I did plan to have a demo that I could invite people too, to test some simple conventions and flows in tandem with this blog but there is a few things that need buttoning up before I can let people loose on it.

Looking ahead, my next blog will likely include feedback from the first round of testing and the next set of core features:

• Insights and Analytics: Wardrobe and Trends Insights system, users will be able to see data like: how much of their wardrobe is fast fashion, the seasonality of their wardrobe, usage of their wardrobe, etc.
• Admin/Moderation tools: systems admins and moderators will be able to use to manage users and control the system.
• Design system implementation: This one is a bit of a stretch, I don’t think I’ll be able to get the Design System implemented by the time I want to upload a new blog but I should hopefully have Figma document I can share.

At the time I’m publishing this blog I don’t have a roadmap but I’m considering drawing one up and will post the first draft in-place of this copy if I do. And If I don’t this copy will live in perpetuity evidencing my crippling indecisiveness.

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