Toolhub/Progress reports/2021-11-19
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2021-11-19.
Slavina Stefanova joins team
[edit]Slavina Stefanova has joined the Toolhub team. Slavina is a newly hired software engineer in the Foundation's Technical Engagement team. Slavina was previously an Outreachy intern with Wikimedia in round 22 (May-August 2021) where she worked on a python tool for working with Wikimedia SQL dump files among other things.
Auto-complete/lookahead search for adding tools
[edit]Raymond's feature for selecting tools when editing lists has been merged. The feature is now available for user acceptance testing on the demo server.
UI for favorite tools
[edit]The feature for tracking a user's 'favorite' tools has been merged. This ended up being a collaboration by Srishti and Bryan to add frontend support for the backend API which manages a special type of list that is only visible to the authenticated user. Tools can be added or removed from this list using a "Favorite" button shown on the detail screen for each tool. The list itself can be browsed from the "Your favorite tools" screen which is linked from he user menu available to logged in users. The feature is now available for user acceptance testing on the demo server.
Improvements to development environment
[edit]Last week's declaration of victory over MacOS & Linux Docker differences was a bit premature. Most work is now unblocked on Linux hosts, but another source of file ownership and permissions problems was revealed when updating an existing python library to a newer version. Bryan has a workaround for MacOS users, and has proposed a feature addition to Blubber which may provide a more robust long term solution for varying the runtime UID and GID of a container. Preliminary local testing with a manually modified Dockerfile appears to validate the concept. Bryan will continue to discuss possible negative side effects and implementation with the upstream project's maintainers.
Always expand navigation drawer if user prefers reduced motion
[edit]Lucas Werkmeister has contributed support for detecting a user preference for reduced motion and forcing the side navigation menu to a permanently horizontally expanded state when set. Hurray for technical contributors, and thanks for the work Lucas!
No report next week (2021-11-26)
[edit]US based staff of the Foundation have Thursday 2021-11-25 and Friday 2021-11-26 off for the Thanksgiving holiday. Because of this short week for half of the team, we will not be providing a summary report next week.
Wrap up
[edit]Slavina's arrival completes the currently planned growth of the Toolhub team. Salvina, Raymond, Bryan, and Seve will continue to work on establishing workflows and practices for the team in the coming weeks and months. Work will continue to focus in the near term on adding more features related to lists of tools and addressing technical debt accumulated during the course of building the 1.0 version. Planning is also underway for the next set of major features to be worked on during the Foundation's January-March 2022 fiscal quarter.