Ayyooooo
What a journey. What aaaa journey.
A theme both me and Luke have been relaying to you all is just how big this update is and just how much we've been through to get here. While the regulars would be able to tell you, I would tell you my life story POV of this project that would no doubt qualify for a book deal with WHSmith (a UK major book story), I do want to keep this shorter and to the point as I've got a few of these to write.
Firstly, thank you. Thank you to all of you who have been patient with us. Trust me when I say we did NOT take the re-write on lightly. So let's start there. The re-write.
Why Rewrite
Again, I'm going to keep it to the simpler terms for the sake of not blabbing on with myself. Essentially, the code base that v0.4 was running on was not one I personally designed. Combine previous contributors and Luke's early found knowledge of tech we use, the old code base needed work, and a lot of it. Something that I mitigated by agreeing each new feature to a section would invoke a small re-write / upgrade. With that said, when we started looking at the Ui upgrades alone, we found that actually the ui framework packages we used had been upgraded and fundamentally caused what's known as a "breaking change". This broke the entire UI. Without realising it, we were completely dependant on this framework, something that's quite common though it set us back trying to upgrade as we had to due to the core logic upgrades we wanted to do.
During this period of annoyance, I also found that our other "misc" ui package also had some heavy upgrades ready, combining that with the level of Ui detail we wanted to achieve for usability sake, it became clear early on, I needed to write our own control and Ui library. Taking on something like this not only takes a great deal of time but it's also tedious beyond words. The positive side of this though means I have complete control over every Ui component. When we look to the future, this is a huge benefit and was well worth the time though not something we planned.
Phew... oh wait no... That was just the Ui. While that didn't eat away at a load of time, it did eat something. I'll point out that this is the v0.4 ui that I've just re-done, not the v0.5.
So we move on and Luke has done an amazing job on cargo. Long story short, flyLAT was NOT ready for cargo. It would have been so unbelievably clunky. At the same time, we're talking to some of our users about what they want to see, how they want cargo to work, all while v0.4.X is coming to a grinding halt. Oh boy it got rough. This was around March of 2024 as well. At the time I believe me and Luke had personal reasons for taking a step back, so while re-writing things, trying to work on new features, we're suddenly hit with a middle finger from our system which high-lighted the final piece to this re-write puzzle. We had a number of high level issues that aren't worth explaining but the moral of this story was we very quickly found that the code base was now un-fit for new features. The problem was at the CORE of the system, the very framework that ran the app.
Alas we arrived at the ground up re-write. Luke understood why I pushed for this. If we built cargo on a system that wasn't ready for it, we'd only have to re--build it and likely break it at a later date. So from March to June of 2024, I had the fun challenge of writing a completely new core and supporting frameworks to handle flylat in our own custom way. This was before any new ui, new features or even bug fixed took place. In this, I had to re-import the old Ui, screen by screen and assess just how bad each one was in terms of "quality". I don't think I can put into words just how much work this took. So now you know, this is why we re-built.
Delays
Between Luke's Wedding that I sadly couldn't attend, my taking a sweet swan dive into the floor at speeds not even the SR-71 saw, thus becoming a human friction brake and a number of plans to just simply live a little, we've faced delays to the sound of weeks. Realistically, if we remove my incident, August would have been the release date, something I know we've previously announced.
Listen, "stuff" happens. My incident was possibly the final, or what I'm hoping is the last middle finger 2024 is going to give me. This year, 2024, has been something of a rollercoaster. Earlier in the year, I had close family with health scares, another close family member who unknowingly went into Hospital for their last time and ultimately passed away and finally, my incident. I'm dumbing this down of course, there was countless weeks of delays that goes into these factors. As for Luke, well his wedding is understandable, but again these take time so there at least a couple of weeks in this too.
Closing Thoughts
Well there you have it. To put it in short "technology" and "life" happened. Coming up, I've got some deep dives into new features that I've designed and put into the app, so keep an eye out for those in the next few days!
Once again, thank you for baring with us, hopefully this is an insight into all that happened.
Until the next waffle fest,
Simmy
