Now that we drastically sped up our local GraphQL requests, we can comfortably reduce these timeouts from 20sec to 6sec before deciding the test failed! What an exciting improvement :3
I have this in the scripts, but the dev command is the big deal: it saves me ~2sec locally per GraphQL request :3
But the dev command requires an upstream change, I have a local fork working with it, but I'm gonna try to get a PR upstream!
Oops, we had a trailing comma, I feel like this might be why some tools seemed to respect these settings and other tools didn't!
This change seems to enable us to remove our weird hacks that made `vercel dev` run…
I'm gonna extend `itemSearch` to also look up the total number of results, and the fragmentation between `itemSearch` and `itemSearchToFit` finally caught up with me :p
I've deprecated `itemSearchToFit`, and moved the fit parameters into a new optional `fitsPet` parameter for `itemSearch`.
I'm going to keep `itemSearchToFit` around for now, because old JS builds still use it, and I'd like to avoid disrupting folks. But I'm not going to add the new total results field to the results object it returns, and that's gonna be okay!
I was starting to write a Cypress test, and noticed there was no placeholder to use for searching, and I don't know how that escaped my notice for so long! I guess I commented it out for some reason, but I forget why, and this seems fine now! (Looks like we removed it when we added zone suggestions? Idk!)
It's my first time using it, but it feels great already, I'm excited!
Getting it set up in WSL OpenSUSE was a bit tricky, but we got there! Had to install a lot of deps, a font package, and add some basic config to ~/.bashrc.
This guide gave us most of it, but we had to do a couple other little things, too! None of them were too nasty though, just some Googling and trying things. https://nickymeuleman.netlify.app/blog/gui-on-wsl2-cypress
I haven't been keeping these up to date, so at this point they're more overhead than they're worth.
Helpful in the early days when we were iterating fast and making more mistakes, but now we're more solid (and I learned how to just resend queries from devtools :p)
Oops, the new `canonicalAppearance` arguments couldn't handle being omitted rather than being null, due to a low-level SQL call site that cares about the difference.
This meant that loading an item page in an old tab, with an old copy of our JS, could cause a crash.
Now, the backend will be okay with queries from old pages, and respond the same as before!
This isn't a huge deal, because once everyone is on the new JS we won't send queries without this parameter anyway… but I like my optional arguments to actually BE optional, without surprises lurking >.>
Oh right, I left in a hack to just always pick HAPPY_MASC or HAPPY_FEM, back when it was just the basic colors. Now that we're all the colors, we need to be able to handle fallbacks for missing or unlabeled poses, too!!
Previously, I kept this constrained to valid species/color pairs only, because we didn't have a great error state. But at this point, it feels worse to throw people out of the color they're looking at, and to make it harder for them to pick the color in the first place!
Wowie, this was hard to get right, but I'm very pleased with where it ended up!! React `key` stuff was a total brainwave, and even though it depends on kinda obscure knowledge, it made this whole thing WAAAY easier, omg
Ok cool, so apparently another win we get from using `ts-node` is that I can finally easily use some non-native-Node features like ES module import syntax, for consistency with what I'm doing in the main app source! That was getting on my nerves tbh. Ooh I bet I can finally use `?.` too, I've had to rewrite that a bunch…
Gosh, I'm really down this rabbit hole, huh? :p Anyway, turns out the `vercel dev` command contains a _fork_ of ts-node that doesn't respect the `ts-node` override key in `tsconfig.json`. But it does respect the env var!
So I've now set up `yarn start` to invoke `vercel dev` with the new env, which in turn invokes `yarn dev` to start the create-react-app dev server. Whew! (Probably a better dev experience tbh.)
`yarn build` was crashing on my `build-cached-data` script, because we were trying to run the Typescript file uncompiled!
Now, we run it with `ts-node`, which transparently compiles Typescript files before execution. Phew!
`react-scripts build` made some automated changes to `tsconfig.json` for compatibility with `create-react-app`, and I also added a `ts-node` section to override one of them so we can compile to CommonJS for `ts-node` script execution!
Oh yay, I'm pleased with this! I hope it works out well!
stale-while-revalidate is an HTTP caching feature that gives us the ability to still serve relatively static content like item pages ASAP, while also making sure users generally see updates quickly.
The trick is that we declare a period of time where, you can still serve the data from the cache, but you should _then_ go re-fetch the latest data in the background for next time. This works on end users and on the CDN!
I've scanned the basic wardrobe and homepage stuff and brought them up-to-date, and gave particular attention to the item page, which I hope can be very very snappy now! :3
Note to self: Vercel says we can manually clear out a stale-while-revalidate resource by requesting it with `Pragma: no-cache`. I'm not sure it will listen to us for _fresh_ resources, though, so I'm not sure we can actually use that to flush things out in the way I had been hoping until writing this sentence lol :p
Trying to get that Item page fast!
I don't really want to ship this as-is, because I'd really like to get stale-while-revalidate working before shipping a 1-week cache timer… will be tricky though!
The Tooltip elements seem to still be taking a bit, I don't really know a great workaround for that… could maybe split it out into a separate box and defer the rendering on it, so it doesn't block the first pageload?
Before the tooltips, I thought the focus state wasn't clear enough at a glance, so I added an extra focus outline to the species faces picker area. Now, I think it's clear enough with the species name tooltip popping up!
