I paired briefly with Sumana on some basic CSS, but fixing the lag problem on my picture chat project consumed most of my day. Kate had suggested that I try using a spritesheet to speed load time; I was skeptical that it would make that big of a difference (there aren’t that many icons yet), but I figured I’d give it a shot. But I still wanted to automate the creation of the spritesheet, since I intend to add more icons as I have the inclination to draw them. So I spent the morning and part of the afternoon running in small, frustrating circles around a small handful of poorly documented imagemagick Node modules, trying to get anything working.

At some point I finally realized that I was in fact getting an error message at load time — I hadn’t noticed it because it was buried in the logs by all the socket-connecting. I asked on Zulip and Anton pointed out that I’d probably forgotten to enable the Websocket ability on Heroku. Which, of course, I had. Fixing it removed the lag and any remaining resolve I had to get spriting working.

So picture chat was up in time to present at Thursday presentations, despite some tricky business with closures right before the deadline (thanks, Mary and Kate!). Here’s a link to a frozen copy of the transcript from a couple of minutes of my batchmates sending messages, and here’s a composite of several of my favorite phrases:

The arrow icon was Rishi’s idea, and a very good one.