Times flies by!
What did I do?
On the tech side I was thinking about and started implementing models for application settings and pre-defined option lists for certain properties.
Ideally not only the interface but also the data and the options should be translatable into different languages, so that needs to be reflected in the configuration and administration options of the app.
Thankfully I found out about the idatosabiertos/femicidios-latam repository that formulates a data standard for femi(ni)cide data and their options that I can take a look at and compare with the team’s current structure in the spreadsheet (It’s in Spanish though and translation takes me a while).
For data entering frontend I started a VueJS project and finished first round of user authentication and user management functionality (more to come though).
I decided on a monorepo for the main app and split the current repository into a backend and frontend part and adjusted CI/CD accordingly. I also wrote the first versions of Dockerfiles and docker-compose (currently untested).
Both backend and frontend now have basic i18n for German and English implemented as well.
On the team side I prepared a meeting with the volunteers in the team and we talked about ways they can bring in their ideas and needs and give me feedback. We talked about mockups and user stories and opened a spreadsheet where they can write everything down.
After talking to people about some GDPR concerns I also wanted to start writing our data processing documentation but didn’t get around to it yet.
What am I doing right now?
Next up is continuing to set up the data models and the respective interface. I’m aiming to have all the basic interface necessities done to invite some team members to a first try out in two to three weeks. With the data modeling done I can start writing an importing task for existing spreadsheets and prepare some useful seed data for settings and so on.
Motivations & challenges
Sadly I lost quite a bit of time last week when adjusting GitHub Actions to work with a monorepo (I didn’t realize external actions don’t take working_directory set on the job level into account …). Another time consuming hurdle was setting up Coveralls code coverage for the backend as the standard gem seemingly doesn’t work with Ubuntu 20.04 (because OpenSSL?) and once I found the issue and switched to the coveralls_reborn gem everything worked. But I think everything around CI done now and should not cause any more problems. Yay!
I’m really looking forward to working on some UI in the coming days, too, which is usually my favorite part. I read a bit about Vue3’s composition API and it looks really useful for larger applications so I want to try it out.
