Introduction
Week 4 was about making things real. We deployed our first services to the cloud, refined our visual identity, and received critical feedback that will shape Panday's user experience. The gap between prototype and product is closing.
Design Team Updates
Reagan had a consultation meeting with Henry, gaining clarity on design direction. She created paper sketches and began developing a new logo and mascot in Illustrator, aiming to give Panday a friendly, approachable identity. Bruno connected with BCIT trade students to gather more survey responses and discussed possible new directions with the team over the weekend.
Darrel finished and submitted the survey findings document, then worked on lo-fi wireframes and updated design components based on user feedback.
Development Team Updates
Nikita achieved a major milestone: deploying a FastAPI server running an embedding model locally using sentence transformers on an AWS EC2 instance using Terraform. This infrastructure will power our AI-driven features. Ozem fixed node edges and label positioning to make the roadmap visualization cleaner, while reviewing Python and FastAPI for backend development.
Josh continued analyzing the SkilledTradesBC website, using Claude to evaluate its usability—confirming that the 5461-pixel-long page with hidden expandable sections creates cognitive overload for users. Peter significantly enhanced the LlamaIndex implementation, adding a command-line chat interface, migrating from JSON to persistent Chroma vector store, and hardening the index rebuild logic.
TL;DR
We deployed our first embedding API to AWS, created Panday's visual identity with a new logo and mascot, and completed our user survey analysis. The technical infrastructure is taking shape alongside refined designs.
What's Next?
Week 5 will integrate ReactFlow with our design system, implement the chatbot feature with node interactions, and prepare for our midterm presentation.