2020 Projects

[Greg Stanton Marra]

Does anyone have a large project they'd like to undertake in 2020?

As sources of inspiration:

1. Zach compiled social media to guide mobile feature development, the results are here.
2. Greg ran a survey in Dec 2018 to understand our users and their wishlists, results are here.

We generally have seen a lot of demand for features that:

1. Help you while you're at an event know what's happening
2. Help you watch FRC online / keep up at live events you're not at

There's a wide variety of things we might try to do in 2020. Beyond "keeping the site running" and "making developers' lives easier", are there any projects anyone wants to try to tackle?

-Greg

[Brennon Brimhall]

As far as I see things, I think there's an opportunity to focus on some internal/plumbing changes that don't necessarily provide user features:

• We will need to transition away from Python 2 in the next year.  Per the FB post last night, it seems that it might be prudent to identify if Python 3 is really the answer to move forward.  Migrating to Go might result in hosting savings and may be a similar amount of work, for example.
• Is there a way we could get a cost breakdown for hosting the site?  If the bulk of the costs are in the API, I'd be happy to work on a TBA footprint feature so consumers can be aware of their upstream impact and be good citizens.
• Will we do GDCV this year?
• As mentioned in another thread (see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/thebluealliance-developers/iVGMXHDHeoY/-9Atyn_tAwAJ) and on Slack, there's also the opportunity to do some documentation houskeeping.
• I'd be happy to write a blog post or two about how to use the API.
• myTBA could use some love.  I've actually stopped using it because it's been too buggy for me.

[Greg Stanton Marra]

Comments inline.

On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 10:41 AM Brennon Brimhall <brennon...@gmail.com> wrote:

As far as I see things, I think there's an opportunity to focus on some internal/plumbing changes that don't necessarily provide user features:

• We will need to transition away from Python 2 in the next year.  Per the FB post last night, it seems that it might be prudent to identify if Python 3 is really the answer to move forward.  Migrating to Go might result in hosting savings and may be a similar amount of work, for example.

I suspect migrating from Python2 to Python3 will be substantially less work than re-writing the entire site in Go. 

• Is there a way we could get a cost breakdown for hosting the site?  If the bulk of the costs are in the API, I'd be happy to work on a TBA footprint feature so consumers can be aware of their upstream impact and be good citizens.

We do not have good accounting for API related vs non-API related costs. We share a lot of caching between calls that power the website and calls that power the API, and our first-party apps use the API for their data access. Figuring out how to instrument this would be an interesting project.

I can share the December GCP cost breakdown and a ~March GCP cost breakdown, as December will more accurately reflect "base case" costs since Phil turned off the SQL server, and March will reflect a "peak case" month. I'll do this when I get the Dec bill in a few days.

• Will we do GDCV this year?

@Eugene Fang can weigh in, I think it's less likely we will unless the game makes it interesting. 

• As mentioned in another thread (see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/thebluealliance-developers/iVGMXHDHeoY/-9Atyn_tAwAJ) and on Slack, there's also the opportunity to do some documentation houskeeping.
• I'd be happy to write a blog post or two about how to use the API.

A code tutorial for getting the API up and running in something like Python or Java would be great! 

• myTBA could use some love.  I've actually stopped using it because it's been too buggy for me.

What aspects do you find buggy?

 

On Sunday, December 29, 2019 at 8:00:11 PM UTC-7, Greg Marra wrote:

Does anyone have a large project they'd like to undertake in 2020?

As sources of inspiration:

1. Zach compiled social media to guide mobile feature development, the results are here.
2. Greg ran a survey in Dec 2018 to understand our users and their wishlists, results are here.

We generally have seen a lot of demand for features that:

1. Help you while you're at an event know what's happening
2. Help you watch FRC online / keep up at live events you're not at

There's a wide variety of things we might try to do in 2020. Beyond "keeping the site running" and "making developers' lives easier", are there any projects anyone wants to try to tackle?

-Greg

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[Brennon Brimhall]

• Migrating to Python 3 is reasonable.  Do we have a roadmap for that?
• Once you get those cost breakdowns, I'd love to look through them.
• An accounting figure is something I've been very interested in.  I'd love to implement that feature, but I feel silly focusing on that instead of on assisting with a Python 3 rewrite.
• OK, I can work on some informal documentation on that.  How would we feel about publishing reference TBA API clients?
• The other thing we'd need to make sure to address is that a good chunk of usage is probably from spreadsheets.  Maybe Eugene or Phil could chime in here with API request logs...the tell-tale sign in those cases would be the X-TBA-Auth-Key being passed in as a GET param.  As I understand things, the GET param means that each request is a cache miss, so those requests would likely have a higher footprint anyway.
• It's been a while since I've used myTBA, so I'm a bit hazy in what issues I had.  I couldn't unenroll devices.  I can't find an open issue about it, so maybe it got fixed.  I also still have https://github.com/the-blue-alliance/the-blue-alliance-android/issues/904 open, but that's maybe more of an Android thing.
  

[Greg Stanton Marra]

Comments inline

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 3:09 PM Brennon Brimhall <brennon...@gmail.com> wrote:

• Migrating to Python 3 is reasonable.  Do we have a roadmap for that?

Nothing specific. I'd love someone to share resources related to how to approach a Python 2 to 3 migration for our hosting environment. Do we need to do it all at once, or can we go piecemeal and have different routes served by different code? 

• Once you get those cost breakdowns, I'd love to look through them.

Shared on a different thread. 

• An accounting figure is something I've been very interested in.  I'd love to implement that feature, but I feel silly focusing on that instead of on assisting with a Python 3 rewrite.
• OK, I can work on some informal documentation on that.  How would we feel about publishing reference TBA API clients?
• The other thing we'd need to make sure to address is that a good chunk of usage is probably from spreadsheets.  Maybe Eugene or Phil could chime in here with API request logs...the tell-tale sign in those cases would be the X-TBA-Auth-Key being passed in as a GET param.  As I understand things, the GET param means that each request is a cache miss, so those requests would likely have a higher footprint anyway.

We automatically publish API's using swagger codegen, although perhaps moving these to the core tba project would help their discovery?

https://github.com/TBA-API 

• It's been a while since I've used myTBA, so I'm a bit hazy in what issues I had.  I couldn't unenroll devices.  I can't find an open issue about it, so maybe it got fixed.  I also still have https://github.com/the-blue-alliance/the-blue-alliance-android/issues/904 open, but that's maybe more of an Android thing.
  

 Why do you need to unenroll devices?

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[Zach Orr]

Weighing in quick -

I'd love to get some myTBA work done this season, since it's a very under-developed but high-potential feature in TBA, but I've got a lot of other projects. If anyone else is interested in working on improving myTBA this season, I'm more than willing to help where I can. You can also join the #mytba channel in Slack to discuss how we want to improve myTBA.

As for our mobile apps, there's no shortage of things to work on for our iOS app, and our Android app needs some quality-of-life fixes. If anyone is interested in mobile development, feel free to reach out and we can help get you up-and-running, or reach out in the #dev-ios and #dev-android channels in Slack.

As for unenrolling devices, we have an issue on GitHub for removing connected devices from an account. I'm an outlier, but I have 106 devices connected to my account. Being able to trim down this list would be helpful. This issue has actually been assigned to me for quite a while (it's kinda clientapi related) - I'm willing to work with someone else to get this done, if anyone is interested in doing this work.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thebluealliance-developers/CANRNkfMBg1dKbSCRTdG%3DEkqnk%3DmvHY3O69oxyMay2TgLkrSfeg%40mail.gmail.com.

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~Zach