109 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
109 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
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---
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author: "joostdecock"
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caption: "I don't drink, but this seemed appropriate for a celebration post ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯"
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date: "2018-08-25"
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intro: "Celebrating one year of freesewing.org: Announcing the freesewing library"
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title: "Celebrating one year of freesewing.org: Announcing the freesewing library"
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---
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Exactly one year ago, the doors of freesewing.org swung open for our users,
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while those of makemypattern.com get one of those *we've moved* signs.
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Looking back at [that blog post from 12 months ago](/blog/open-for-business),
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it almost beggars belief that the things announced then are only one year old.
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The concept of a draft, the comparison functionality, or even paperless patterns.
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They all celebrate their first birthday today.
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Not this site though, because [driven by the looming GDPR deadline](/blog/gdpr-plan), we dumped our Jekyll based site for a new front end sometime in May.
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## More languages with less languages
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GDPR was only part of that story.
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Other reasons for the rewrite were our desire to support multiple languages,
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and to simplify our technology stack.
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In other words, we wanted to reach people who speak different languages,
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and wanted to limit the number of programming languages required to do so.
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### More natural languages
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We've done remarkably well on this front.
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While you won't find every last bit of content translated, this website's main features
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are now available in five languages:
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- English
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- German
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- Spanish
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- French
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- Dutch
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Which really is 100% thanks to the great work of [our wonderful translators](/i18n/).
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### Less programming languages
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The switch from [Jekyll]() to a [Nuxt](https://nuxtjs.org/)-based front-end
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has removed [Ruby](https://www.ruby-lang.org/) from our technology stack.
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Freesewing.org now runs on JavaScript, PHP and a little bit of C (which we'll ignore for now).
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But removing programming languages is not a goal *an sich*.
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Rather, the underlying ambition is to simplify things, make it easier for people to get
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involved, and ultimately attract more contributors so that the project can grow and flourish.
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Today, designing/developing patterns is not an insurmountable obstacle.
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We've got [benjamin](/patterns/benjamin), [florent](/patterns/florent),
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and [sandy](/patterns/sandy) to show for it.
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All of these were contributed by people for whom freesewing was initially new,
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they went through the design tutorial, and in the end created a pattern of their own.
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We'd like more people to follow in their footsteps. So making the process as simple as
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possible is a worthy investment of our time.
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## Announcing freesewing, the library
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For the past 2 months, I have taken time off from pattern making and sewing to
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tackle our [technical debt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt).
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Specifically, I've set out to rewrite our core back-end from the ground up in JavaScript.
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But there's a twist. It's no longer a back-end. It's a library you can use
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both in your browser, or on the server with [node.js](https://nodejs.org/).
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It is currently in version 0.10, and feature complete with freesewing core.
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It's [available on GitHub](https://github.com/freesewing/freesewing) and
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[NPM](https://www.npmjs.com/package/freesewing), and is fully documented at
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[developer.freesewing.org](https://developer.freesewing.org/).
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And while its API is richer than core's, it's footprint is actually a lot smaller:
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Which is good news, in case you were wondering.
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## What happens next?
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A lot of work needs to be done before we can actually use this on freesewing.org:
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- All our existing patterns need to be parted to the JS version. [Brian](https://github.com/freesewing/brian) is the first pattern to have been ported.
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- Rewrite our data back-end in JS. Since this will remove the PHP programming language from our stack.
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- Build a new website using the freesewing library and our new data back-end.
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This really is a lot of work, and while I hope that by the end of the year we'll have made
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good progress, I can't promise it will be done.
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## But I just want patterns
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Chances are, all you care about is patterns.
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What you want is more patterns, better patterns, different patterns.
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And all of this rewriting is not exactly pushing your buttons.
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I get that. I really do. I for one have a list of patterns I'd like to see added to the site.
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And my work on other aspects of the project keeps me from adding them.
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But I believe that investing now in a streamlined developer experience will have a knock-on effect in the long term.
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If we want a few extra patterns, this is not the right approach. But if we want a lot more patterns, I believe it is.
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And I want a lot more patterns.
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