Merge pull request #43 from humannum14916/contribution-post-andrew-c

Contribution post for Andrew C

_posts/2024-04-26-maintaining-tunnelvision.md

@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+---
+layout: post
+categories:
+- Contribution
+author: Andrew Cudzinovic
+---
+
+# Tunnelvision
+
+[https://tunnelvision.csh.rit.edu](Tunnelvision) is a catalog of RIT's dorm
+tunnel murals, created by fellow CSH member Wilson McDade. He also helped found
+the Tunnel Art Group, or TAG (which isn't yet an official club; we're working on
+it) which is how I got involved with the project. The community is very small,
+Tunnel Art Group is only about 10 people and Tunnelvision itself is almost
+entirely maintained by Wilson. As web maintainer for TAG, I'm going to be taking
+over maintaining Tunnelvision after Wilson graduates next semester.
+
+![front page of Tunnelvision](../assets/2024-04-26-maintaining-tunnelvision/Tunnelvision.png)
+
+# Community Evaluation
+
+Tunnelvision is a very new and very small project, and the only available
+resources are the source code itself, >10-line README, and the exiting
+maintainer, Wilson. From an outside perspective (randomly finding the repository
+on Github) it definitely isn't a great project to try and contribute to due to
+the lack of resources and small community.
+
+While in my previous post I mentioned that I really enjoyed working on Clippy
+and the Rust community, I didn't feel ready to start making larger changes with
+so little experience. Tunnelvision was a project I was already somewhat involved
+with, and felt a lot more comfortable jumping into.
+
+# Choosing an issue
+
+One of the things Wilson mentioned wanting to do on the project was improve the
+way the backend interfaced with the database of mural data, specifically using
+a library called SQLAlchemy. Since I'm going to be working with the project a
+lot, this seemed like a good place to start. However, this was a pretty big
+challenge to take on - before this, I had never done work with a database
+before, and the backend was written in Python, a language I'm a lot less
+experienced with.
+
+# Preparation and setup
+
+Before starting on the actual refactoring, I spent a few days preparing my
+development environment and learning about the different libraries I'd be
+working with. I also went through the source code for the backend to get an idea
+of how extensive the changes would need to be. The final step was getting the
+credentials for accessing the development database, which took a while to get
+coordinated.
+
+# Doing the refactor
+
+The actual refactoring ended up mostly being a game of find-and-replace, looking
+through the code for places that accessed the database and replacing them with
+the SQLAlchemy equivalents. However, the code responsible for taking database
+responses and sending them out to the client ended up needing a lot of work,
+due to the new database interface not returning raw values like the old one.
+
+# Testing
+
+Once the initial refactoring was done, I started the long journey of testing and
+debugging. At first, the server couldn't even send the front page without
+crashing, but slowly that changed to being able to do the landing page, then the
+catalog page, then use the search system. The hardest part to deal with was the
+admin panel, since it was the only part of the site that needed to send data
+back to the server and modify the database. I ended up having to directly
+connect to the database a few times to remove improperly-deleted data, but I did
+manage to get it sorted out.
+
+![a Python stack trace on a web page](../assets/2024-04-26-maintaining-tunnelvision/Error.png)
+
+# Submitting the changes
+
+Now that the modifications were done, I pushed the changes to my fork and
+submitted a pull request. However, at this point it was finals season, and since
+both Wilson and I are students, merging the PR got pushed down the priority list
+for the time being. At this point, it probably won't see any progress until
+summer.
+
+![the pull request on Github](../assets/2024-04-26-maintaining-tunnelvision/Pull.png)
+
+# Conclusion
+
+This contribution was a very different experience compared to my previous work
+with Clippy, in both positive and negative ways. Things were definitely a lot
+less organized and there were fewer resources, but it was really nice working on
+a smaller project and really becoming part of the community. In the future I'm
+planning on using what I've learned coming into this project to make the
+contribution process easier for future contributers.