Jeff Makes Software

Last weekend, I released version 20 of POP Forums. I've been at it for 24 years, and I've got the version history to prove it. There are few things in my life that have been consistently there for that long. There have been a few minor contributions from others, plus the language translations, but it's otherwise been mostly me.

Repost from my personal blog.

For a lot of years, consumers of my open source project, POP Forums, have asked about the best way to integrate with whatever they were working with in their environment. This usually landed them in a world of hacks involving disparate databases. Of course, there's a better way, and that's to use some kind of OAuth flow through an external identity provider. The groundwork for that has been around for a long time, in the shape of social logins. However, the idea here is that the external provider would be involved to provision accounts, eliminating any kind of signup flow.

Yesterday I mentioned how enamored I was with Apple's new (last year) generation of self-made silicon laptops, but the lingering question in my mind was, could I completely get away with not having to run Windows in a VM? So I borrowed an M1-based Mac and gave it a shot. The good news is that it's possible, though it took me about four or five hours of messing around to make it roughly equivalent to the Windows experience. 

Get the latest bits here: https://github.com/POPWorldMedia/POPForums/releases/tag/v19.0.0

It's hard to believe that it has already been over eight years since I migrated all of my goodies from a dedicated server to Azure. For the most part, I'm thankful for this arrangement because maintaining your own hardware isn't something I ever enjoyed or wanted to do. Having a single box was always asking for failure, too, even though I had an extra drive in the thing (which did fail once) as a backup. I couldn't respond to scale needs if I had to either, and there was one point where it would have helped. Meanwhile, Azure has improved in a lot of ways since then as far as pricing structures go. The SQL database pools were a real game changer for me, because it works with the same flexibility as app services, which all live on the same "plan" with whatever memory and CPU constraints you're paying for. The database uses some goofy units, but whatever they are, I rarely average more than 5% of them.

As I get closer to the release of POP Forums v19 (and there sure are a ton of things baked in there!), I'm starting to think back about my first experience using web components. For years I've talked about trying to modernize the front-end of the app, choosing instead to focus on scalability, but there isn't much room left to squeeze more performance out of it in practical terms, or at least not for what I need. What I kept coming back to was the fact that forums are mostly walls of text, and with tens of thousands of indexed threads on Google, I wasn't going to risk two decades of investment to break it with exotic and unnecessary appification of the, uh, app. Still, a big old file of spaghetti Javascript wasn't sustainable either, even if I did in the last release get away from the old jQuery dependency.

About a month ago, I wrote a bit about how I made a word game, but I haven't talked much about how I built it, so let me go a little deeper there.