Departures

Shipped the Tags feature so now TestFlight apps can be placed into interesting categories for better discovery!

I've found lots of cool TestFlight apps that don't exactly fit into the App Store's categories, using Tags will help make those apps more discoverable I think.

For example, there is an entire cottage industry of apps for Tesla Vehicles: https://departures.to/list/tag/tesla

Before when links were submitted I was manually verifying and adding them to the site.

Once I had a procedure figured out it was easier to write some code to replace me.

This also makes the site more useful since developers can post when they want instead of waiting for me, win-win.

Now anyone can post a TestFlight public link to Departures.

With over 1000 TestFlight apps indexed, a search feature was badly needed.

Not wanting to spend too much time on this, I chose Algolia since they had a Node package for the backend I could hook up with Parse and the frontend is easy enough to put together with the JS they provide.

Developers can now indicate they developed a submitted TestFlight link and we'll reward them with a short description of the app and a blue dot 🔵 to highlight their apps on the site.

There's lots of developers building cool apps for TestFlight that may never be on the App Store and this is a way to highlight them.

With so many links and detail pages, Jekyll build times were increasing to the point it was affecting reliability of the site.

This was the validation needed to go fully dynamic.

Migrated our backend from Airtable to Parse using EJS for the frontend.

Updated our robots to read and write data from Parse instead of Airtable.

I had purchased the departures.to domain a few days after launching almost a year ago, but I was lazy and didn't want to change DNS records at the time.

Finally made the change after introducing detail pages as we could now have cool URLs like departures.to/twitter-beta

As a single-page site it was becoming really long and unwieldy to work with.

Created detail pages for each link using Jekyll plugins and some custom code to pull in data from Airtable directly instead of using a CSV file.

Now I can automate the site to update every few hours since it will pull directly from Airtable on each build.

Departures is indexing hundreds of links now, and I can't keep manually checking which ones are open or full. We need robots.

Created a NodeJS script to go through our links in Airtable, check whether the TestFlight is open or not and change the record accordingly.

Put the script into CircleCI so links are crawled on a schedule.

Now when the site builds it will more accurately reflect whether the TestFlight is open and available to join.

A single-page static site would be easiest to launch quickly, so let's build that.

Using Jekyll and Bulma I was able to create the departures board aesthetic I wanted in a few hours.

Without validation it made zero sense to build a backend so enter Airtable as our database of TestFlight links since it's free and provides an easy way to accept user submitted links.

With Netlify hooked up to the Jekyll repo, hosting is done.

Site updates are a simple process of exporting a CSV from Airtable and committing It to the Jekyll repo which triggers a site update on Netlify.

Registered flydepartures.com and launched.