Industry Project: Backburner

This week this project had to take a back seat to other projects with sooner deadlines, and I only accomplished part of what I had originally planned.

This week, I finished implementing Redis for caching and Amazon's S3 for long-term and cross-instance storage. In addition, I added a administration page with a login page to allow developers to have a simple centralised control system for their server.

This week I spend the majority of my time working on the Redis and S3 code to cache data locally and store data across instances in the long term. During this process I again encountered race conditions, which slowed development. Both my Redis and S3 functions were returning undefined objects instead of the data they were supposed to fetch.

I solved this issue by sourcing and implementing an alternative library for Redis: Async-Redis This library promisifies the functionality of the standard Redis library, such that it is usable with async/await.

With this sorted, I looked into different libraries to perform the same promisification of the AWS-SDK. After some time of looking, I was not able to find a library to do this for me, so I experimented with restructuring my code. Shortly into restructuring, I discovered that the AWS-SDK has promise methods for many of its functions, which allowed me to neatly solve the race condition issue with S3.

While working on the Redis and S3 code, I found myself wishing for a simpler way to run my testing code. I slowly came to the conclusion that a simple Web page served by the server might be the best option to fill that need.

This page setup was relatively quick and easy to implement, as I was able to repurpose work from other projects. I added a page to ask for login details, and check those details on the server side before sending a response to the browser. When polished, this will act as an administrative tool for developers to manage the server from a user-interface instead of a command line.

The plan for the next week includes finishing the GitHub implementation, adding the Discord API calls, then writing the C++ calls to contact this server from the Feedback Panel. Beyond this point, I plan to move on to polishing the Feedback Panel with some textures and animations, and documenting the installation procedures for both the server and the panel. Ideally, I will end this next week with all necessary features implemented and polished.

— Industry Project: Server

For the remaining time until submission, I will be undertaking the same tasks as last week, as I was not able to see them to completion within the week.