The State of Scribe

At every major milestone in this project I make the same mistake of thinking all the infrastructure is setup and now I can really begin.

Scribe began as a personal learning project in August of 2016. I had recently joined the FE team as a transplant from design and needed to get up to speed as quickly as possible. With a limited JS background it was important to me to have a personal project to tinker with so the most time consuming mistakes could take place on my own time rather than on the clock.

At time of writing there are now 227 commits and 199 passing unit tests.

There were things that I knew I would need to tackle heading into this. Namely authentication. There were also concepts I didn’t realize I would have to struggle with - I’m looking at you async. But after 7 months of active dev, I’ve definitely leveled up a bit and learned a TON. I’ve also gotten a glimpse of just how much there is left to learn.

Things I have learned or gotten better at while working on scribe:

• node
• async
• mongo
• mongoose
• webpack
• cookies
• react
• redux
• mocha
• should
• express
• user auth
• CRUD
• …

The list goes on. There truly is nothing quite like actively doing a thing to learn it.

The last two big PRs were features that dealt with user creation and authentication as well as campaign management.

Next up is a whole lot of maintenance. I need to fix some bugs that have popped up and do a big dependencies upgrade as well as move to webpack 2. In addition to that there are some things that will make my life as a dev easier like actual HMR and improvements to the test app. I’d also like to implement Enzyme testing and improve some of the existing unit tests.

After that I should finally be able to implement the weather API I wrote in December as a means to avoid user auth. I had thought implementing the weather API would be simple - but it really just highlighted the need to do user auth and campaign management.

As I ponder things it has become clear that I will need some sort of digest loop for future events, like when a spell pops, or the weather changes. This digest loop is going to be a lot of fun and is another example of the extensive infrastructure that is required as this beast of a project continues to grow. So I guess that weather API isn't quite ready to be plugged in just yet...