by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 37)
In any case, the outcome of that is that the tech has improved. And I have done a relatively good job of clearly publishing any "more user visible" improvements to docs.ourbigbook.com/news and social media such as
though it is important to note that there have been more than one "fix a hard bug" weeks that were not published because they would just bore readers.
During this period the main focus has been on improving OurBigBook Web, i.e. the dynamic website that powers OurBigBook.com. There are two reasons for that:
As a result, Web is now way less buggy and much more usable.
If you look through the list of Web updates, there is nothing specifically mind blowing. The core ideas have largely crystallized, and we are just trying to making them click. I have a few more punches up my sleeve, but the core is decided.
Figure 3.
OurBigBook Web article announcement
. Source. Another cute new feature, you can send an email to your followers about a new amazing article you created.
Web process has been somewhat slower than what I'd like. Of course, it is the case of any project that things are easily said than done. But there are two other main structural factors that have played into it:
  • I have my first baby now, and we're learning how to deal with that on the fly.
    For example, we could have put him on childcare a bit earlier, but due to inexperience we've kept him a bit longer than we maybe should have.
    Things are well sorted out now, but not matter how good your support system is, at the end of the day, and more often night, it is you the parents that have to deal with a lot of inevitable baby issues. Unless you want them to turn into psychopaths and drug addicts that is, which I don't. I've reached the point of semi failure middle age that the baby feels like my best moonshot.
    All of this sets a fundamental limit on how many hours you can work per week.
    But at least with the donations I was able to work on OurBigBook at all. Because if it weren't for that, I would have to focus entirely on the generic job instead and OurBigBook would have been put on hold.
  • the choice of Web stack. I was allured by Next.js. I can see the beauty and usefulness of a Node.js render front-end that also runs on backend and hydration. That is awesome.
    But:
    • React is insanely hard to learn and understand. Furthermore, it is also hard to understand the performance problem that it solves, and actually have a benchmark where this problem is solved faster than just delivering some HTML files with ad-hoc Js on top.
    • the lack (or perhaps excess of shitty) actual web framework like Ruby on Rails and Django means that I have to rediscover the wheel many times over for all the essential support activities like testing, login and so one
    At this point a rewrite is out of the question. I've managed to master things well enough to get a decent result, and given up on the few things that I couldn't for the life of me achieve, after documenting them very well for posterity of course.
Aside from Web, there was only one thing that received a significant improvement, and that was the OurBigBook VS Code extension. The extension is not perfect, and it is not the "final UI", which has to be some WYSIWYG implementation, and there are some fundamental limitations that cannot be overcome without patching VS Code itself. However, the extension is already extremely usable, and I'm writing this on it right now. Basics like syntax highlighting, jump to definition and autocomplete are very useful and usable.
Figure 4.
Tree navigation in the OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension
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  1. OurBigBook Project Update March 2024
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