Independent study post mortem

Server

Server changes:

What we accomplished

• Wrap all Redis calls with a semantic wrapper
• Reimplement Voting service from scratch
• Implement Radicchio Redis timer

What didn't go so well

• Stubbing service functions with Sinon.js after conversion to ES6
• Voting Service most likely has uncovered bugs
• Features like dashboards, private rooms and user email authentication became out of scope

What we learned

• How to stub out functions for unit tests
• How to release a library (Radicchio) on npm
• A ton about the deeper workings of Redis
• ES6 Syntax for conversion from ES5
• Deeper understanding of REST HTTP design and websocket handlers

What we could improve on next time

• Reach out to open-source communities about difficult tasks that we got stuck on
• Better time-management in terms of what to focus on while working on the project (less time wasted on broken stub tests)
• Should have learned React and Flux in the beginning to help on front-end side of project to accomplish more

Client

Client changes:

What we accomplished

• Redo project structure
• Implement hydrate app state to simplify initial setup
• Implement react-router high-level components
  • Allows linking to join/create modals
• Implement Material-UI spec with form validation
• Reduce build times from upwards of 30 seconds to under a second through incremental builds
• Implement user colors and board options
• Implement admin only updates of board options

What didn't go well

• Did not get to hooking up the timer
• Did not get to hooking up the voting
• Didn't get to implement other features that were out of scope (dashboards, private rooms, etc.)

What we learned

• Understand how to properly structure a Flux/React project
  • The challenge of moving a large codebase, back to industry standards
• Understanding the React lifecycle, we've worked with React in a smaller scale operations, but this has a much more complex state.

What we could improve on next time

• Use user stories to stay grounded in solving end-user problems, to avoid spending too much time on best practice solutions that do not directly benefit the user.
  • This will always be a balancing act, but having these improve side-by-side is important

NPM libraries published for the project

• radicchio - A distributed timer implemented with Redis and Lua
• express-json-status-codes - Extend the Express response object to have helper methods to set the status code and return JSON.
• material-color - Dead simple JS access to the material UI color palette.