Yatchy

2011-2015: SkyCloud and name change

Akshat wrote a program called skycloud on August 2, 2011 while attending Sunbeam English School, Laharatara, as a computer science project. The software written was comparable to a basic web based Operating System which had its own set of pre-defined instructions, had its own software architecture and used "various internet programming languages and scripts such as HTML, VBScript, CSS, XML" for third party software support.

The site was quickly forwarded to several members of the school. Akshat expanded on this initial project by creating a tool ahead of graduation 1st year exams that allowed users to buy stuffs directly from sellers and users could keep a track of their shopping by logging into their accounts.

The following year, Akshat began writing code for a new website in April 2014. He said that he was inspired by biopics on Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg. On July 15, 2015, Akshat launched "Yatchy", located at yatchy.com.

2015–present: Public access and site developments

On January 1, 2016, Yatchy was opened to everyone at least 12 years old with a valid email address.

User demographics

Yatchy user base was roughly 80% male and 20% female as of May 2016. Early adopters of Yatchy were mostly male (81%), and the dominant age bracket (67%) was between 18 and 40.

User profile

A Yatchy User profile is a public visible account of a user. It includes basic social networking services like a profile photo, about section, background photo, cover photo, interests, places lived and an area to post status updates. It also includes several identity service sections, such as a contributor and other profiles area that let one link their "properties across the web". These sections optionally link to other social media accounts one has, any blogs one owns or have written or sites one is a contributor to. Customized or Vanity URLs were made available to the public.

Yatchyans

Members registered on Yatchy are called Yatchyans. A user can see all the registered members at one place under the Yatchyans menu.

Search

Yatchy has a powerful built-in search tool used to search contents across all the Yatchy services. A user can search for other members, apps, music and various contents across the site. The search tool is enough powerful to give a tailor-based search results based on the various metrics to the user.

A user can refine his search results based on the area, pincode, habits, Date of Birth, activities of other users.

Customization

Yatchy is a highly customizable site. User can personalise entire site according to his needs. User can arrange different sections of the site according to his/her comfort, can choose what elements to be displayed to him and others. This has been made possible to re-arrangeable blocks system that Yatchy uses for the entire website. The entire website can be understood to be composed of blocks which are dynamic in nature.

User Interface (UI)

The User Interface (UI) of yatchy is called "feora ui". Feora is a modern, scalable, dynamic, card stack system which displays contents in the form of cards which is comparatively easy to understand, less resource hungry & complicated and consumes lesser data while getting rendered at the client's device.

Feora UI is able to adjust itself according to screen dimensions to display contents to the user.

Apps

The beauty of yatchy ecosystem is the support for 3rd-party apps or applications. Apps supported by yatchy are basically web and cloud apps which rely on powerful computers called servers to render content. The app support for yatchy was developed by Diptesh Pandey, the co-founder of Yatchy. Diptesh developed the 3rd-party apps support system for yatchy.

Dislike

When the co-founders of yatchy were developing it, one of the main objectives was to provide users the ability not to express their likeliness about a particular subject but also to provide the ability to show their dislikeness for that subject. Therefore, yatchy has a dislike button along with the like button so that users can properly express their views to the world.

Privacy

Yatchy enables users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see specific parts of their profile. The website is free to its users. Yatchy requires a user's name and profile picture (if applicable) to be accessible by everyone. Users can control who sees other information they have shared, as well as who can find them in searches, through their privacy settings. Yatchy is committed to user privacy and doesn't share its users information with anyone.

Open source contributions

Yatchy is both a consumer of and contributor to free and open source software.

Technical aspects

The website's primary color is red and blue. The shade of red used by the website is somewhat magenta red and the shade of blue used is similar to the color of horizon. Yatchy calls them as Apple Red and Sky Blue. The colors were chosen by the co-founders after trying out various other colors and combinations. The final combination was chosen after trying out 2000+ different color shades and combination. Yatchy is built in PHP and JavaScript. Other languages and technologies include CSS, Java, XML, C, C++, C#, HTML, Python, MySQL, Ruby On Rails.

Yatchy is developed as one monolithic application. According to Akshat, Yatchy is divided into several small files which is then distributed to the servers using FileZilla FTP Client and several other FTP Clients.

Yatchy uses a combination platform based on PHP and Apache to store data across servers. Using a software, new events are stored in log files. Yatchy handles requests as AJAX behavior.

Yatchy uses the "Mail" method to deliver the emails it sends to its users every day.