JasonDJ t1_jchfens wrote on March 16, 2023 at 9:13 PM

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Open-source tool from MIT’s Senseable City Lab lets people check air quality, cheaply. by chrisdh79

Like Reddit, the huge for-profit social media empire that still had an 8 hour long near-full outage a couple days ago? Yeah.

Except it seems like there’s a lot more client-side stuff happening on this non-profit open-source site. From what I could load before by browser crashed, at least.

I’m not faulting this site, either. If anything the biggest fault is auto-loading a world map. It’d probably be better to not do that and either get location and zoom in locally, or ask for location. I’d also think that it’s probably better to scrape programmatically (I.e., have something on a HomeAssistant Dashboard that gets the air quality for your specific location) and I’d guess that most people wouldn’t interact with the main page directly.

[deleted] t1_jchfno6 wrote on March 16, 2023 at 9:15 PM

[deleted]

JasonDJ t1_jchh4fj wrote on March 16, 2023 at 9:24 PM

I wouldn’t even so much say “lazy” as “underfunded”. Takes money to pay devs, takes money to build servers. More server side operations requires more servers which requires more money. Cheaper to push that to the client.

Plus I get the suspicion that their front end map dashboard is a nice-to-have but the primary use-case is API…especially in mobile. Not knowing anything about this site/app though.