Development Bits

There’s quite a bit going on under the hood almost daily here on Slipmat, but due to the nature of the work most of it is unvisible until the moment of release. To open up our process more and to give more technical people a more technical insight in to what’s happening with Slipmat, here’s a topic where I can post more technical stuff and my personal weeknotes and other stuff that relates to Slipmat development.

Feel free to mute this thread if you aren’t interested in following along.

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Good Hello Week 35!

Follow @Uninen on Twitter if you want even closer look on misc daily stuff :slight_smile:

https://twitter.com/uninen

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Wait, we have a Twitter account?!

So a couple of weeks flew by pretty fast. I took ~45 USD from the seemingly bottomless Slipmat funds and spent a long weekend attending PyConline AU 2020 conference, learning a lot and getting some great advice from colleagues all over the world. My intention was to get answers to some of the toughest technical challenges here on Slipmat by interviewing some of the best professionals in our field. To be absolutely honest, the online format and 9-hour time difference wasn’t quite optimal for me but I did learn a lot and also got some distance to everyday lockdown life which actually was super nice. Thank You Slipmatians who made this possible for me :heart:

I spent most of last week working on small UI-related things on the new live page which is now in a lot better shape than it was. We have new (not fully implemented yet) HYPE emojis over the video and a ton of big and small bugfixes. We finally have the request system back online for the new live page which means that we’re very close to getting rid of the two-page nightmare. The work on the live page is nowhere near done but I thought it was important to get something visible done for the listeners as well.

Speaking of something visible, I found out that Slipmat has also a Twitter account. But don’t hold your breath as we don’t have anyone to curate it so there’s probably not much content to be seen in the future either :sweat_smile: (No joke: if you want to help out with our Twitter account – dm me!)

Most of the bigger visible changes have been bogged down a little bit by various things. At the moment I’m preparing to launch new Live Dashboard for our DJs which is the one final big thing that is keeping the old live page around. But for this we need some new UI components which are really slow to build from scratch so the slow hiatus will take another week or two more.

On the backend side of things we’re currently finishing event recordings functionality which will be landing very soon. That work also involves setting up new experimental Frankie instances. If any of our active DJs are interested in testing out stream redirecting / re-streaming to multiple locations, I’d be very happy to get some alpha-testers testing this out!

Okay not so short update but update still. See you around! :slight_smile:

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These weeks keep on flying past so fast!

…but I thought I’d update you some of the recent developments under the hood as they are mostly invisible otherwise.

Since the release of Beta 34 on October 16 we’ve been hard at work to bring a couple of huge new things online. Firstly, the Frankie Pro video and audio recordings have been in beta test for a few weeks now. The recording itself works great but the automatic tooling to package the recordings after the event is still missing as is the UI (most notably the video and audio player for the archived event page). If you want to be among the first to have automatic recordings and want to help in testing, dm me and we’ll add you to the beta group.

The other big development front (pun intended) is the new frontend code, starting with the new DJ dashboard. The work is moving ahead nicely but first steps feel super slow as we need to build so many things from the ground up. To get a small idea how low-level some of the pieces are, past few days I’ve been working on packaging our internal logging tool (which is now open source!) so we can properly use it with all our projects. The only purpose for this tool is to help with development and output debug and error messages. In normal situations no one will ever see or even know that this exists, yet it is a crucial part of our tooling for the new code.

In similar fashion we’ve explored new design for data tables (code) and other tools like the script building tool (discussed here in more detail) for getting better understanding of the new UIs and general lower level bits that we need for building a long lasting foundation for the new frontend.

This all is, and should be, mostly irrelevant and boring to anyone else but developers. I just wanted to share the work here to remind everyone that even though there are less visual changes happening on the site, the work continues under the hood every day. And, it’s not that fun or exciting for us developers every day either :slight_smile:

Happy weekend peeps! :wave:

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Happy Friday, peeps!

It’s again been a while since the last update. Unfortunetely the latest update slated for this week didn’t quite come together in time so we’ll need to wait one more week for it. But I’m very happy to tell you that we have gotten some really great steps forward with the new tech stack theae past weeks :slight_smile:

I also broke a cool milestone of working on Slipmat 100 continuous days, every single day, not missing a single beat!

I’ll post more updates next week, in the meanwhile, very happy Thanksgiving weekend — stay safe! :vulcan_salute:

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look forward to seeing it! Congrats on the 100 days that’s some achievement.