Development productivity - next set of changes

[levibostian]

It has been really fun getting back into active development of Wendy! 2 weeks ago, I announced the first set of changes to come to Wendy. Those changes have completed and so I am here to announce the next set of changes coming to the project.

This next set of changes is all about setting up the Wendy iOS project for increased development productivity. Do not expect any new features to come out of this set of changes. However, it’s these set of changes that will accelerate the development of new features in the future!

The vision of Wendy (and Teller) have been to make building an offline-first app so easy that it’s more work to not make it offline-first. In order to make that vision a reality, there are some important features that must be built. But, in order for those important features to be built, we have some development workflow improvements to make. That is where this set of changes comes in.

What changes?

The goal of this set of changes is to remove the 2 biggest slow-downs of development the project currently faces.

✅ 1. Get away from CoreData

Update: v6 of Wendy has been released. v6 is the first version without CoreData.

The latest version of Wendy uses CoreData as the data store for the SDK. This decision has slowed down development since the beginning. We are migrating to a more simple solution to store Wendy’s SDK data, the file system.

For existing developers using Wendy in apps today, a migration path will be provided to make this a smooth transition to a new data store.

✅ 2. Write automated tests

Update: v6.0.1 has been released. Test suite updated and bugs found from tests have been fixed.

When Wendy was in alpha/experimental phase, the process for testing Wendy did the job. With plans to improve Wendy, it’s time to change that process.

✅ 3. Migrate to async/await

Note: This is being added after writing automated tests in project. While writing tests, this part of the code was a major slowdown.

To make the codebase easier to maintain and to more easily develop new features in the future, the concurrency implementation of the code needs an update.

✅ 4. Update dependency injection strategy

Note: This is being added after writing automated tests in project. While writing tests, this part of the code was a major slowdown.

Constructing and managing dependency instances in the code is currently all manual. Causing bugs, frustrating debugging, and a lose of productivity. Time to implement a better way to manage dependencies.

Time to get started

Thanks again for your interest in Wendy. It brings me joy every day to see others find Wendy and check it out 😄♥️.

[levibostian]

Update: v6 of Wendy has been released. v6 is the first version without CoreData.

[levibostian]

Update: I have added 2 more pieces of work to this milestone.

When I increased the test coverage in the project, I encountered a few situations where debugging failed tests was time-consuming and frustrating. I looked ahead at the roadmap and saw some new features that I want to add to Wendy. I realized, to build these new features in a reliable and predictable way, this tech debt should be addressed sooner then later.

[levibostian]

This work is all complete! All changes have been merged and deployed.

I'm working on the next announcement for next chunk of work to complete.