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Weekly Report: 7th October 2019

FrontierNav Terminology

Over the years FrontierNav's data model has changed a lot. This meant various parts of the codebase and web app used a range of words to describe the same thing. As I start introducing more terminology to the public, there's really no room for confusion. So I went through the project, migrated all the data and reduced the number of terms.

As an example, most data models have terms where these mean the same thing:

FrontierNav probably used at least 4 of these terms in the same contexts but now it only uses two: Entity and Relationships.

FrontierNav Performance

It's really hard for me to tell how well FrontierNav performs on lower-end devices as I don't own one. So as a general rule, after finishing a substantial feature, I'll put in some time to improve its performance or at least look into it.

This week, I optimised the Data Tables which uses artificial viewport scrolling to avoid rendering thousands of rows at once. Any lag in rendering is easily noticable while scrolling, even on high-end devices so it's important to optimise it as much as possible. In the React world, that usually means caching function calls (memoizing) and reducing re-renders in general. There's not much else to say about it. React's DevTools are good enough as they provide rendering times and let you know what triggered it to understand where the costs comes from.

Other Stuff

Thanks for reading.