Logbook, week 6 (2019-03)

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Development

This week development time was focused on three aspects:

1. Integrate an alternative Docker deployment method
2. Fix remaining blocking issues for the 0.18 release
3. Kickstart a small project to gather data about the Funkwhale network

The new alternative deployment was contributed by @thetarkus and makes things easier by bundling all Funkwhale processes and services (database, redis) , in a single Docker image. Although I was more a partisan of the "One container=one process" philosophy, I have to admit the image works great and is considerably easier to deploy than our docker-compose based method (which will remain supported by the way ;). I really think this easier set up will help the project grow!

I won't talk in details about the small issues that were fixed. It includes some album cover parsing issues in files metadata, and some small UX improvements.

However, the last item will probably interest you. Our current list of instances at https://join.funkwhale.audio is powered by an hardcoded list which is hard to maintain. I've also been asked regularly how many Funkwhale instances and accounts we can find out here, and I don't have an easy answer to this question.

Since we're going to redesing Funkwhale's website, I thought it was about time to prepare for a new instance picker and this requires collecting data about Funkwhale instances. Initially, I was thinking about using the work done at the-federation.info for that, however, since I want to collect specific, non-standard data, I decided to implement this myself.

This app will crawl every instance on a regular basis and gather anonymous data about each instance such as the number of user accounts, the uptime, the Funkwhale version in use, etc. Data collection itself will likely be opt-out and togglable using a flag in their instance admin panel.

This is also an occasion to experiment new technologies and tools (especially async programming), which is something I've been waiting to do for a long time and may even be useful for Funkwhale in the future.

The source code (still a WIP) is available as usual, on our GitLab instance.

Project management

The 0.18 release will be out next week, probably Tuesday or Wednesday! I'll try to stream the release like I did last time ;)

We made some progress on the non-profit, although I don't have anything to share yet. However, we're also structuring the way we're working on translations, and if you ever worked on Funkwhale translations, you probably want to have a look at the dedicated forum topic.

Personal

I'm really excited about next week and the 0.18 release. I have a lot on my plate this month, with the release, the work on the non-profit, and the planning and discussions for the next releases, but, at the same time, it feels like more people have contributed to the project over the past few weeks, and I can definitely feel an increase in the time I spend writing/discussing. This is a good thing, because it removes some load from my shoulders and spread it on multiple people.

I'll be present at Fosdem, in Brussels, if you want to say hi, discuss about Funkwhale, or simply meet me. I'll wear a Funkwhale T-Shirt so you don't miss me ;)

See you next week!