BugGuide 2.0 code sprint status update

Migration of one of the major subsystems which involves filtering text is now complete.

Our current status is 39 tickets completed and 42 pending.

For those familiar with how software sprints work, we currently have 63 tickets pending and 22 tickets completed.

No response needed, just wanting to put out there that I have gotten the error message with the bug drinking cofee about a dozen times in the last 2 weeks and searches are moving extremely slow. I assume this is all part of the difficulties with the upgrade but just wanted to let someone know. It has happened using a recent Mac OS as well as with Windows 10 Education and Windows 10 Pro. I don't use mobile much.

Thanks to a generous donor, I am now arranging a contract to get us closer to a 2.0 release. We expect to begin in October.

The latest work is on automatically generating shared data from BugGuide for GBIF (via Bison) and for the Moth Photographer's Group. The intent here is to have the system run automatically every week instead of being a painful by-hand process.

The code that generates this is written against the BugGuide 2.0 codebase that is at the end of the migration pipeline, which runs constantly, taking a snapshot of BugGuide and migrating it forward.

It has been more than a couple of weeks since May. How about a report of where BG2 is now?

Anxiously waiting.

A small group of beta testers now has access to the new site.

The workshops on Friday went very well, I thought. They were the culmination of this sprint from the 1st of the year until now. I may take some time this week to catch my breath.

We had a great group of participants who were very positive. We set them loose on the latest build of BugGuide 2.0 and watched as they explored and encountered bugs and listened as they gave feedback. These were turned into bug reports and we will be working our way through them in the upcoming week or two. At that point I will be contacting a group of people who have agreed to be beta testers and we will collect feedback from them. When those bug reports have been fixed, we will go to an open beta.

The reason I want to proceed in this way is wise use of everyone's time. There is no use a whole bunch of people reporting the same bug when we are already aware of it. Let's do it with a small group and as it gets better increase the number of bug reporters. To give you a sense of where we are, we currently have 63 open issues. A few of these are major, like the ability for editors to change the taxonomy tree.

Another reason for a small group first is that while things are pretty much working on 2.0, performance work has yet to happen. BugGuide Classic, as we've started to call it, has years of performance tuning. We want to make sure that 2.0 is not a total slug when we switch over!

We have maps! County-level maps. That is the one of the big accomplishments this week. Joseph LaForest and I have the two systems talking to each other so that BugGuide provides data and the EDDMapS system provides a map back to BugGuide. I am very excited about the possibilities here.

Looking over our last week, there are a ton of user interface and accessibility changes, an API tab has been added so that generating an API token is as simple as clicking a button, the Image Clipboard looks nifty, we are experimenting with several approaches to seeing content and activity for a contributor, and the search backend has just been put in place for work this week.

This upcoming week is the last week of our contract. Laura Jesse and I will demonstrate our work at the workshops on Friday.

I feel like these weeks are flying by. This week we hit a milestone in that we have a REST API in place that supports filtering, paging and querying. Those of you who know what that is and have been waiting for this will be freaking out with joy. For those of you for whom the above is just technical jargon, it means that there is now a means by which computer systems can "talk" directly to BugGuide. For example, a website might ask BugGuide for a list of the most recent submissions to the Odonata, and BugGuide will give it the data in a standardized format.

We've also fixed the breadcrumb generation and made them accessibility-compliant and worked on views for books and links. This next week we will focus on creating two dashboards, one to track your submitted images and one to track taxons of interest.

With the Day of Insects BugGuide workshops just around the corner, we are going 100 miles per hour.

This week was focused on two things. First, rewrote the migration of forum indices which decreased the length of the migration pipeline from 30+ hours to 16 hours, which allows us to iterate faster on checking code changes. Second, finished the migration path to the new theme so that theme changes can now be done quickly and efficiently.

Let's see...the last week has been full of migrating book references and links, working on the taxonomy tree (number of children now shown), theme settings, making "Browse" work, and permissions for guide pages.

In the last week we have been working on image width and height migration, adding the new theme, making breadcrumb trails appear correctly, configuring the date widget, eliminating duplicates in the search index, and moving guide pages.

Since the last update, we've got the ID field working as private tagging on BugGuide 2.0. Several bugs in the forum migration have been addressed. Dates prior to 1970 are tested and working. The bbcode filter now supports https. And we're hard at work on the taxonomy tree.

Thanks for all the hard work you guys are doing. We really appreciate it.

Sweeet!