DEVBLOG - DON'T EXPECT MUCH

I only set up this website today even though I've been working on this project since around June so I'm just going to continue from here

So uhhh... We meet again? Yeah I totally forgot about this site. In my defense however, Grade 11 was the hardest time of my life, so I feel like I deserved to forget about one of my several projects at the time. However, I have been slowly chipping away some some GUI related items every now and again for the past month or so when I have a little time off. And OF COURSE when I finally polish the GUI to an app that had become redundant due to the lack of loadshedding in the past 8 months, Eskom decides to be funny and start handing out Stage 3 every now and again. And the cherry on top is that the powers that be have also changed the API response structure... again. Just when I thought I was done with this project 🥲. Oh well, hopefully I'll give another update within the next 6 months (not like anybody is reading these as they come out anyways).

So, aside from my apparent absence from this project, things are still happening. I only got slightly sidetracked by the erroneous amount of work grade 11 has to offer, as well as a couple other secret big projects I've gotten started with 👀. But it's now holiday, I'm back and have massive amounts of motivation to get this project over with. And what better way to quickly get it done with than restarting from scratch? I've learnt a lot in the past few months in terms of coding and good practice, and looking back all that seems to be completely non-existent in my latest update. Knowing what I know now, I almost threw up after seeing the nightmare spaghetti code that I seriously deemed fit to be put on other people's computers. So, a week or two ago, I stared a new repo, and opened NetBeans, because there is absolutely no chance that I'll be manually designing a GUI ever again. As of today about 90% of the frontend elements have been implemented and now I'm busy polishing the backend classes before I move on with the actual application loop. Hopefully I don't forget about this site (again). You can take a look at the code on Github right now, but it's basically useless.

Kinda forgot that this site exists. Well anyways, I'm back to working on the program and have made some improvements in the backend, including bundling the assets with the program's .jar file as well as some more, you guessed it, bug fixes. That being said from now on I reckon it's just going to be some refactoring and frontend improvement.

BUGS! BUGS! BUGS! Since the first release (v0.2.3) there have been 12 commits to the repo, and I'm currently at v0.2.3.3. So all in all, things are going well
🥲👍

2nd post in one day? Aren't I productive? Anyways, I finished the help documentation, the GitHub repo is up and running and beta testing has begun. Also, that API response change that I was talking about earlier took like 3 lines of code to fix and if anything it simplified my code even more.

I just had to say it didn't I? The ESP API has changed its API responses in a way that completely breaks my code. Fantastic. However, based off of the 5 second glance I took at the new format it looks like a relatively easy fix (hopefully). I'll take a look in the morning, it's 1am and I need my 8 hours.

Today I reworked how the application handles being minimized to the tray as well as added support for sending notifications to windows, as well as added the ability for the GUI to update throughout the day based off of some times;

• At midnight

• At 05:00 (generally when Eskom changes the loadshedding stage)

• A few minutes before the start of a loadshedding stage

• At the end of a loadshedding stage

Over the past 2 or 3 months I've been slowly rewriting the code from version 0.1.0 but in the past week I've finally gotten my motivation to code back again. This week I've been refactoring the code and improving its reliability, now I'm pretty confident that it works 99% of the time. Now I'm just waiting for the API responses to be completely reformatted and then that'll really be nice. I also wrote the help documentation, but I'm going to hold off on finishing it until everything is finished (or at least ready for release. On that note, I should make a Github page).