Learn more about our humble beginnings on the v1 version!

Development Logs 1 (4/18/20)

Published on: 4/18/20
#development-logs

These logs cover roughly the first month of development. Lot of progress, and a few side trips: no matter how urgent getting a platform out of the door is, there must always be time for a good April Fool's joke.

  • [Frontend] Released demo of a thread interface (see it at test.boba.social). You can refresh the page multiple time to switch between different threads and see various example of how things might end up working. Feedback is still being collected.

    • Main request was for threaded comments.

      • Given the restricted space available for comments (the website is being designed with a strong eye towards mobile), this might require getting creative with the interface to "expand the conversation" after a relatively-short exchange. I have some ideas in mind, but the design might be rough for the first iterations.

      • Threaded comments very potentially moved to v0 given the interest.

    • A really big behind-the-scenes decision has been the choice of QuillJS as a text editor. While it might not seem such a big deal, the choice of editor impacts many aspects of development in the longer term and I spent a fair amount of time considering alternatives.

      • I was able to hack around expand Quill to produce an interface similar to Tumblr. I personally consider Tumblr's posts design very suited to the type of mixed media content I want BobaBoard to allow. If nothing else, they have more UX designers than I do.

      • Quill's extensible interface makes it easy to program new formats for text and embeds (e.g. images, videos). I predict the amount of options to grow fairly quickly!

      • Of course, post options will also rapidly expand beyond text. Just today I spent a little leisure coding time "priming" the codebase for what's to come.

  • [Backend] We have a database schema!


    This is a fundamental stepping stone for development. The database schema defines how data is saved and retrieved by the platform, and impacts every aspect of it: what data can be quickly accessed? How easy will it be to introduce new features? How much will I hate myself in six months for the choices I've made today?

    • A huge thank you to my seasoned database developer friends for reviewing and improving my design. You know who you are <3

    • Not pictured in the current schema: the tag blacklisting interface. This has already been added, but I'm too tired to retake the snapshot. So yes, don't fear. It's there.

    • Speaking of tags, I'm considering the support and implementation details of complex blacklisting for advanced users. This won't be in the v0: I'd rather take more time to study how people actually engage with BobaBoard, and attend to the needs for content filtering as the website and userbase grows.

    The database is the powerhouse of the web.

  • [April 1st Joke] Please enjoy BobaBoard's very first April 1st Joke (and cheer to many to come).

    Here.

    • While this was above all about having some silly fun, it allowed me to experiment with creating open source libraries. Oh, yes, did I mention the code is

      free online for everyone to use

      ?

    • Someone asked if there's ever going to be silly image filters as an actual BobaBoard feature. To these people I say: who do you think I am?

    • Most of all, I just want you to witness this:

      Imagine being paid to draw this. Ah, friendship. Best money I've ever spent.

  • [Random] It's has been an exceptionally busy month. I've talked with a lot of people, met even more, made a bunch of technical decisions, recruited volunteers, set up processes... This is not an easy endeavor, and the journey has just started.

    • Let's not forget the most important milestone: set up a tiny blog for development logs.

As usual, please feel free to use the feedback form or send me an email and let me know your opinions, ideas, desires, fears (or, more simply, say hi)! While I plan to use this new blog space to answer some of the most common questions and discuss the future of fandom platforms at large, these initial months are more focused on setting the project up for success.

Look, something has to happen on 6/9. I can't yet promise anything, but, as you can see, I'm working hard on it ;)