Nebula Web Summer Sprint Dev Log

[WillieCubed]

I'm going document the changes I make to Nebula Web along with thoughts about development and other useful resources I've found throughout the summer in preparation for the full fall launch.

Content here may find its way into the Project Nebula-wide blog.

[WillieCubed]

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

I have finally gotten the bulk of the Next.js rewrite pushed to refactor/nextjs-rewrite (#43). Now the rest of the team can take a look and get acquainted with the code base.

I've been trying to come up with a set of contributor guidelines that enforce a certain level of code quality without being too burdensome. Although Conventional Commits may have a slightly higher learning curve, I think it coupled with encouraging descriptive commit messages will enhance development for current and future contributors. I updated the documentation accordingly.

Chris Beam's blog post about commit messages seems to be a good place to start for new contributors and for those who haven't worked on a project with others before. I think I'll have to remember that as the team lead I may have a lot of answers, but those working with me don't have years of experience building personal projects. However, that will come in time.

The code I did push today I did push today pales in comparison to all the changes that need to be made, but moving forward, we now have a pipeline for viewing the app in progress, which is viewable at app.nebula.acmutd.co. Vercel makes automatic preview deployments from pull requests super easy. Eventually, the project will have a separate domain from ACM, maybe nebula.app - (FYI: the Nebula streaming service exists. Oops.) and a separate subdomain for preview deployments (maybe next.nebula.app).

I still need to update the preview deployment to use the develop branch, but I'll do that after #43 is merged.

P.S.: You would not believe the amount of unfinished changes I had to stash just to get this pre-alpha release out!

[WillieCubed]

Also, I finally did my first real rebase from refactor/nextjs-rewrite to the develop branch and for the right reason. The refactor branch was basically just a continuation of the develop branch, so it was appropriate instead of a merge commit.

In case you can't tell, I am proud of myself. 🙂

[WillieCubed]

Upcoming items for me:

• [Feature Request] Support user-sign in to save data #30
• [Feature Request] Allow a user to export a degree plan to file #47

[WillieCubed]

Sunday, July 4, 2021

It took a few hours, but I have resolved #47.

I enjoyed feeling like I could take some feature idea and relatively quickly implement a solution. I just hope the other maintainers get to have that feeling when working on the project. I will say that I didn't understand nearly as much about the browser as I thought I did. I keep forgetting that despite all of the client-side JavaScript we use (since this project is built using React, the quintessential web framework), the web is built off of a document-based model. Using JavaScript to download a file is as hacky as you'd expect: instead of simply calling a function like browser.download(fileContents, name), you have to rely on an anchor tag to open up a new document which automatically downloads a blob with a filename.

The web is weird.

[WillieCubed]

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

I have just managed to resolve most of #48 in the span of an hour and a half. Being able to export and import a file so easily makes me feel proud, even if it's missing a small feature.

I was reminded that I'm still not a master in web development using React as I forgot about how browser events worked - resulting in the import functionality not triggering properly when selecting a plan that was duplicated. This is technically a bug, but it's fixable with a little more work.

We'll have to implement a few other minor quality-of-life enhancements (like selecting which semesters are selected when the user triggers an import), but as for MVP, import and export basically work.

Time to open that pull request!