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A random conversation

Sometimes a conversation with some strangers (over coffee) can be the beginning of something really impactful. For the Bin Days Edinburgh app (www.binday.info) it was a chat with a designer (Andy) at the Creative Mornings meetup back in early 2024. His contribution was MORE what a good designer can do (shaping up with an idea; or doing some ground-work on designs). What Andy contributed was his EXCITEMENT and CERTAINTY that this project will find a fertile ground in Edinburgh.

A piece of paper stuck to the fridge

If it’s not broken – don’t fix it, right? There are 5000 streets in edinburgh where people need to put their bins out on the street on given days, e.g. packaging on ‘odd Tuesdays’, glass on ‘even Mondays’ and food on every Wednesday. But how do they remember when is a bin day? Most people (who we interviewed) gave us two answers:

1. they have an A4 printout of the pdf calendar from the council website. It is a rather complicated calendar for the whole year with bin days marked;

2. they put out their bins whenever neighbours do it (they follow the BINFLUENCERS). Since bins are picked up in the morning, this strategy requires a log of vigilance.

Both of these options are not strictly broken, but they make remembering your bin days another CHORE, a source of friction and produce “D’oh! I missed it again” frustration.

New binfluencers

Our solution was to build a very simple app which reminds you about bin days on an evening before. So that now you can be a Binfluencer! You can download the app on https://binday.info/

It takes a team

Project started in late 2023 when I was teaching the final cohort of Codeclan (coding bootcamp) students (David Bujok, George Tegos, Lewis Ferguson). For one of their portfolio projects, their instructor Pawel Orzechowski pitched the “bins calendar” app idea, but it quickly emerged that it’s going to be a massive project. They produced the first working version, and learned a lot about building apps, but also managing big complex datasets. A year later the calendars in the app started being out of date, so the app required a refresh. Weronika Harlos joined the team, and has been hard at work on refreshing UX, designs, front-end and marketing of the app.

Bin there, done that!

Watch this space, but for sure, it would have never happened if not for: the opportunities given by the meetups in Edinburgh; the community of people who are eager to contribute to projects; and all the lovely neighbours who were so full of encouragement when we started building (and fixing the inevitable bugs).

Pawel and Weronika

For the final stint of our CodeClan course, we had two weeks to build whatever we wanted for our ‘capstone project’. Our instructor Pawel pitched a great idea to the class of creating an app to simplify the process of checking your bin collection day. Large number of Edinburgh residents need to remember when tu put their bins on the street (e.g. every second Tuesday). Pawel showed us the current process of checking what’s your bin pickup day and we couldn’t believe it. The process is tedious, and after around 12 steps you get to a pdf file, which you can print to see when all of your bins are due to be collected.

Lewis, David and George were all drawn to this idea and formed a team to work on this as a group project. What attracted us the most about this idea is that it had a real world use and potential to make a positive impact on the community. Little did we know that six weeks later, here we are continuing our adventure, improving our app daily and constantly looking for ways to make it better and more efficient.

We got to work straight away, pitching our ideas to each other. Pretty quickly we came to the conclusion that a mobile app would be a great idea. Not only will it be easily accessible to the community, but it gives us an opportunity to learn a new framework that we had not been taught on the course. It would also allow us to implement features that would be beneficial to the users. What if we could send push notifications? What if we can use geolocation so it’s even easier for the user to search for their street? Again, these would be libraries that we hadn’t used before but we were excited and driven by the opportunity to learn new things.

However, we started investigating the data on the council website… there was no API, no easy access to the days when bins are picked up apart of 5000 links to pdf files.

To be continued in episode 2….

Stay tuned!