ASaskmike·Jul 24, 2018
Woah great feedback. This is very much appreciated!
I'm not sure if going specifically into all of your points right here is the best way forward. But suffice to say I am very happen to hear them :)
> the abstractions are wrong and most of the code probably relies on some hidden state that's really hard to debug unless you're the code author.
This is very much spot on, definitely something I want to work on.
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The main reason that everything is so spread out (plugins, web API, internal API, etc. etc) is because a ton of people are doing different things with it.
99% of the people only touch the basics, and they don't need to touch any config file, they can go through the UI that handles all of it automatically (Gekko is focused on tech savy but not perse professional programmers). They don't know what (my concept of) a plugin is, and
Read the rest
they don't care about any API (nor any version for that matter).
It's about the other 1% who are kind of spread out over:
- people who want to hook into certain lifecycles (to push certain data to google spreadsheets[1] for example)
- people who only use subparts of the app, for example to have something that can fetch normalized market data from a number of different websites <- this is a big part of the project, but not the sole, hence it should not dictate versioning.
- Or people who only want to create their own prediction making logic (with AI or whatever) and use the execution logic of my app. <- in the process of pulling this out as a standalone library.
- people building tools on top of the web API that bruteforces a problem space to figure out new solutions[2].
So all the people that care about the versioning (not the 99%) are exactly the hobby DIY hacking people who want to open it up and take it apart. And it feels impossible to steer them into "don't touch this because the interface is not a standardized API".
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The main thing I am going to do now is rethink the entire config strategy, because it's a huge mess and I think I am the only one who understands it[3].
[1]: https://github.com/RJPGriffin/google-forms-gekko-plugin
[2]: https://forum.gekko.wizb.it/thread-56589.html
[3]: https://github.com/askmike/gekko/issues/956