February '24 Dev Notes

[GregJohnStewart]

Time to make another one of these before time makes another fool of me. Hello! It's been a fairly productive time for OQM, despite the business of life, and still carrying forward that energy. Of particular note, we have our first patreon patron, which is incredibly exciting. While is a small sample size, they have helped confirm our design goals and given some sense of urgency to get our software in order.

Of particular note, they pressed the topic to rework the network stack of the single host installation, to go through a reverse proxy instead of using different ports. This has been a goal for a while, but in the previous iteration of attempts it proved difficult with the technologies we identified to facilitate at the time. This time, however, we found the Traefik project, which made the implementation very straightforward. This rework amounts to the big update for the purposes of this communique, and is a move in the right direction. While we are still working on some minor kinks, the usage of Traefik simplifies the handling of ssl certs greatly, provides out of the box support for Let's Encrypt, and overall makes things much more secure.

Otherwise, we are still cranking along on the stored item rework. I will note that it's taking its sweet time as we are taking the time and energy to ensure a smooth and functional release, which includes much automated testing. While we are still being selective overall on what will be worked, we are making sure the work being done is done well, is forward thinking in the ways that matter, and amount to a clean transition. I'm personally excited for the changes to finally be out, both operationally to make use of the new and changed features, and developmentally to release my limited development cycles to other topics. Hopefully in the next month or so, I can merge to the dev branch and make a beta release for users to try out.

Anyways, it has been a productive couple months, with more yet to come. Please consider contributing in they ways you are able to in order to help bring Open QuarterMaster to the forefront of inventory management everywhere, and help us continue to do cool things to bring some good to the world.

Thanks for reading, Greg