Hello,
We have the new Meetbot Logs in the production infrastructure environment now.
I have created the draft on commblog.
https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=11191&action=edit
Title
Meetbot Logs 2.0 is Out Now
Content
The Meetbot Logs (or Mote) is a project, that I started working on years ago with Justin W. Flory, Nasir Hussain and Ramya Parimi - way before the time when Fedora Websites and Apps Revamp was even a Fedora Council objective. Dedicating some time out of our schedule, we convened weekly over a Jitsi Call to discuss the requirements, implement features on the code and document everything. Some notable changes like obsolescence of Memcached, the introduction of Pipenv for dependency management, fixes related to frontend theming and addition of a documentation toolchain, were made. Unfortunately, we could not quite make the dent we were intending to make back then, and the work on the project stagnated, when we got occupied in our lives and were unable to make it to the meetings or complete tasks regularly.
Fast forward to the third quarter of 2021, I started looking into the project again - all while reaching out to those who worked on developing the project like Ralph Bean and Chaoyi Zha for guidance on the code sections which required additional assistance. It took some time and effort to conclude that it would probably be the best if the project started with a clean slate, using technologies and paradigms that are more featured and expansive than to trudge along with those that were ageing. That led to me, starting a functional rewrite of the project from the ground-up, called Fragment and proposing the rewrite as a mentoring project for the Winter 2022 cohort of Outreachy, thanks to Vipul Siddharth's assistance.
The changes in the initial version of the rewrite, like those listed below, had a positive reception from the contributors, both within the Fedora Websites and Apps Team as well as from the wider Fedora Project community, and many lauded the rewrite as a welcome change and something which was long due. This version was not perfect by any means, but it did pave the way for more such new changes to be included down the line and for more contributors to participate in its development.
- Asynchronous loading of meeting information and faster searching
- Curation of meeting logs/summaries links to prevent unsafe characters
- Modal-based wizard-like navigation for quicker lookup of meetings
- Exhibiting recent meetings according to days, weeks and months
- Various quality-of-life changes for both users and contributors
Soon after that, the source code was moved to the repository under the GitHub namespace of Fedora Infra and the team started actively developing the project. Our Outreachy intern, Subhangi Choudhary, and Outreachy mentors, Francois Andrieu and I collaborated regularly to introduce even more new exciting features, with Michael Scherer's and Mairin Duffy's guidance.
- Calendar view for looking up recent meetings by days, weeks and months
- Dependency management and automation using Poetry and GitHub Actions
- System theme compliant and uniformly styled dark mode
- Reworked summary modal with info on attendance, topics and action items
- Much faster search using caching and indexing mechanism
- Inclusion of code compliance conformity, quality checks and unit tests
Every time, the representatives of Fedora Websites and Apps Team shared updates during Fedora Linux Release Parties and Nest With Fedora events, about how far we have come with the development and the things that, we plan to do next - the community showered us with their support. The staging infrastructure deployment, which we revealed recently, was also met with a positive reception. It almost felt like this time around we would be able to make the dent, we wanted to make all along. Finally, all the time and effort put into rewriting the project culminated in the final deployment on our production infrastructure environment, which took place around a week back. I extend my gratitude to all those who helped along the way and I cannot wait for you folks to try out our revamped Meetbot Logs webapp!