October '24 Dev Notes

[GregJohnStewart]

Hey All! Thanks for tuning into the first round of a very overdue development notes series where I talk about progress made in the last month.

So, to start off, we now support Ubuntu 24.04! This was a bit overdue, but was delayed due to a hard blocking bug on the Ubuntu side preventing python-docker from being in any way usable. That was resolved this month, and after some quick tweaks to our installers we now run fine on the latest Ubuntu LTS!

Otherwise, we have been heavily working on a rather large refactor of how stored items are actually recorded in the system, which has taken up most development cycles this month. There are several goals for this effort; to simplify the interfaces of managing these stored item entries, make the whole system a bit more flexible, and to truly enable real scalability where one has many of one type of item stored, and need a lot of entries. This process is most of the way along, but far from where it's releasable, so stay tuned!

Feels like a slow month, but the refactoring effort has taken up a fair bit of time as it is a deep and foundational change to how the system operates. At the moment, we have largely wrapped up the backend (Core Api) changes, and are now hard at work updating the Base Station UI to accommodate these changes. Following putting a bow on this effort, we plan on taking a step back to spend time polishing documentation, and organizing thoughts on the next development efforts and the related issues on GitHub. If something in particular is missing, or you have thoughts on what needs addressed, feel free to reach out on any of our channels.

Happy organizing, Greg