Codetown ::: a software developer's community
It was in February this year that i sent this mail to a friend of mine:
from Buls Yusuf
to date Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 2:22 PM
subject Woz 'ere
mailed-by gmail.com
It just came to me. I remember in secondary school then, when you go into classrooms you'll find signatures of people/students that were there before. You'll find things like "Buls was ere, 95". That kind of thing.
Now imagine us writing an Android app that let's people give details of places they are at and that info be made available to anyone having the app to see a list of all those who have been at that location before. It's going to be fully location based.
An example, I go to kilmanjaro on the 10th of Jan and I use the app to save my signature (a phrase, my name, time date etc) using my gps enabled device. You come to kilmanjaro on the 14th of Feb and using the app you view a list of all peoples' signatures that have been at that very location (you should be able to view by name, date, keyword/phrase etc)
The thought just came to me like 10mins ago. What do you think about it?
Buls
Now, i didn't really work on that idea till later in May or so when Google launched the Android Developer Challenge for Sub-Sahara Africa. I had played around with the Android SDK months earlier so i didn't hesitate to rise to the developer challenge.
After months of hacking on code and making it up to the final round of ADC, Yandda! came into existence or partial existence if i may say, since i still have a lot of features i would like to add to it. ;-)
Well, it's currently in the Android Market and below is a description of Yandda! (please try it out)
If you've ever wished that people know that you had visited a particular place in the past or that you were simply there before them, then Yandda! is just the app for that!
Yandda! lets you engrave a signature and tie it to a location (buildings, parks, landmarks etc) for future visitors to discover. It lets other users of Yandda! know that you were once at a particular location. Its similar to how people engrave their initials on walls just so that others can see them. You can engrave and share signatures publicly, with a certain clique of friends or even privately (just visible to you only and no one else).
The Cliques feature of Yandda! lets you group your friends so you can choose which clique of friends to share your signatures with when you engrave them. Depending on your activity on Yandda! you can earn trophies that give you special capabilities. Currently there are 3 trophies that can be earned (more trophies shall be added in the future).
You can create a game made up of your publicly visible signatures for other users to conquer. Anyone playing a game must visit and discover signatures in the actual location they were engraved in order to conquer them. You complete a game by conquering all signatures that make it up. A lot of new features shall be added to games in the future. Please note that when you create a game, it is geo-tagged. This means that when anyone intends to register and play a game they will be presented with games that were created within their current location.
You can also choose what your profile visitors get to see with regards to your public signatures, friends and trophies.
Please send feature requests and suggestions to yanddawachi.abp@gmail.com. Yandda! is in its infancy and new features shall be constantly added so please be a part of it!
Yandda! is available in the android market here. Hope you like it!
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.
Activision has cut build times for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (COD) in half by profiling and optimizing their C++ build system with MSVC Build Insights to uncover bottlenecks in their compilation pipeline. The effort unblocked developers, accelerated delivery, and reduced idle time.
By Matt FosterMicrosoft has announced experimental support for .slnx files in the .NET CLI v9.0.200, unifying the developer experience among the .NET tooling. This new feature aims to remove clutter in the solution file and to reduce friction when working with large solutions.
By Edin KapićMicrosoft's Azure MCP Server, now in Public Preview, enhances AI capabilities by enabling seamless interaction with Azure resources. This open-source tool standardizes AI agent access to services like Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Storage, empowering developers to create context-aware applications. Expect rich functionality and support for custom MCP clients to optimize cloud resource management.
By Steef-Jan WiggersJanani Narayanan and Karthik Ramasamy share Uber Eats' scaling challenges for nX merchant growth. They detail optimizing retrieval, fixing latency from naive scaling, and root causes in ingestion/query layers. Learn about benchmarking, geosharding impact, and their Apache Lucene search platform evolution.
By Janani Narayanan, Karthik RamasamyDistributed cloud, PETs, and AI enable secure, private data processing. This integration enhances collaboration, security, and compliance across marketing, finance, and healthcare, addressing the growing need for data protection.
By Rohit Garg, Ankit Awasthi
© 2025 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown