Octoboxy Version History
Pre-History
It began when I wanted a custom photo gallery.
Towards this goal, I rebuilt the same site, once each year, for five years:
- hand-coded HTML
- Adobe Lightroom galleries
- Drupal
- Wordpress + premium theme
- Wordpress + my theme
On the side I built three versions of an eCommerce site for a t-shirt company:
- Wordpress + free theme
- Drupal
- Wordpress + premium theme
I found myself solving the same problems on both sites, and started thinking about an asset manager that would help me manage unrelated web properties.
First Versions
I called it project "Moonrise."
It was purely an asset index, that is, back-end only. I was using exporters/importers to move assets into a Wordpress front-end.
- 2.5K lines Python
- invoked Photoshop to render raw photos
- indexed thousands of assets
Lightning moment: I was using a web app platform called Django as the foundation for my back-end. Why not build a custom front-end with Django too?
This turned out to be a much bigger project than I thought.
- 12K lines Python
- photo gallery website
Making Ends Meet
The front-end and back-end individually worked, but shared few connections. The next version was about bringing them together.
- unified codebase: workstation and website
- taxonomy data structure
After this I believed the core was stable and began versioning according to major feature updates. Many minor features also evolved that aren't directly named here.
- continuous integrity testing
- generalized digital asset model
- first version with wallpaper art
At 1.8 I added background wallpapers. Reconstructing the approximate date of any version becomes easier because of this trail of images.
From here on please enjoy the art show.
- documents are indexed assets
Fiindex
I accepted the challenge of building a photo-based app to facilitate operations at lost-and-found for Burning Man. The problem gave me an opportunity to explore an excellent real-world use-case for a more complicated app. Many parts of my system evolved as a result.
Do It All Better
v1.10 started as a brush-up on the visual look of the system. Code-wise, it never deployed, but blurred seamlessly into 2.0, a larger re-tinkering of the whole front-end side.
Was also in business school at the time and did a little rebranding accordingly:
Project Moonrise → OctoBoxy!
With my general architecture defined, what began was a long march of improving every existing component inside the system.
- website layer redesign
- 28K lines python
- containerized deployment
- multiple faces on same server
- improved background processing
- better sandboxing
- new security model
By now the core system felt more or less stable.
It was time to tackle bigger problems, like eCommerce and replication:
- eCommerce
- off-schedule improvements
- replication
- performance and stabilization
Third Time’s the Charm
To kick-off the next arc, I set out to fix most of the long-standing annoyances in my design notes. Some of this was simple module renames with little semantic impact. But on another level, some whole parts got rebuilt. The idea was this was a clean platform for whatever interesting thing came next.
- a purifying light shown to every aspect of the system
- 36K lines python
Elementally
Development slowed down for a few versions. This was in part because my attention was on other challenges. Bit also, Octoboxy basically did what I wanted it to.
- introspection and dev guide
- OctoBase spin-off
- private app commission
- consolidated page styles
- threw out some old ideas
- manifest new core index
- page hierarchy now in core index
- ripped out old way of indexing media
By the end here I'd lost a lot of faith. All my sites stayed offline for eighteen months and nobody much seemed to notice. Really began to consider the plausibility of the dead internet theory.
Practical Usefulness
Had a big summer project coming up, needed to make the system be useful again.
- media now in core index
- accounting module
- used as communication platform for a real-world project
- glaze formulations app
- replication works again
- 52K lines of python
That's where we are now.
Thanks for walking this journey with me.
~ Wyvern
