Dev Log: November 2018

This is the second installment of the dev log. Let’s see if we can keep this streak going!

Waka

I’ve made some improvements to health checks - they now check if the realtime data is working in Auckland. It’s still at https://assets-us-west-2.waka.app/status/index.html, but will eventually be rolled into the app.

SMS Notifications for Health Checks

SMS notifications now trigger when the health checks fail (super simple with Amazon SNS), so I’ll know a lot sooner if Waka is down.

I’m also trying to answer the question “What routes in Auckland travel the most km per week?”. I should have the answer to that tomorrow, and I’ll do a little bit of a writeup.

Other than that, there’s been nothing done in actual Waka. Matt hasn’t done anything on waka-importer either.

Nitro 3

I’ve spent most of my time coding Nitro this month.

Nitro Sync Indicator

The overlay position is now fixed - no matter where it’s opened from. However, it’s a bit laggy in some browsers (Edge), and can be laggy on Retina screens. I’ll fix it eventually, but not for the initial release. There’s also a new sync indicator - when a task is syncing, an icon shows up.

The biggest change is from my own custom username/password auth to Auth0. It provides a decent user experience, and I don’t have to worry about other things such as sign up, 2FA, and OAuth. Unfortunately it seems to log you out a lot, but it’s not a huge deal as it’s only a single click to log back in.

I also fixed a couple of other bugs and papercuts:

  • Added the sign out button back
  • Added proper error messages on the login page
  • Upgraded all dependencies
  • Fixed the list ordering without all list
  • Fixed a race condition when notes were being saved

Next month, I want to continue to focus on fixing bugs and improve the performance on slower machines and phones. I also want the sync to be a bit better - stopping your browser from closing if sync is in progress, and triggering a sync if you haven’t been using Nitro for some time. Oh, and I still need to add the settings menu.

That’s it for November! If you have any questions, flick them through to me on Twitter, and I’ll try answer them in the next post.