mattermost-webapp VS excalidraw

I don't know about the quality, but Mattermost is in TS: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp

On the web platform end, we merged the upgrade to React 17 (again) into master, and performed a bunch of (more minor) dependency updates while at it. We also continue our journey towards using MUI-based menus.

On the web platform end, we continue the work on menu components, found and fixed the issue that marked a whole lot of channels as unread last week (with GarphQL enabled). We’ve also been working on performance regression tests. And we’re upgrading moar dependencies.

On the web platform end, the team has been working on unifying post components (and cleaning up afterwards), more fighting with Webpack and friends in the context of the front-end part of the multi-product architecture, testing out a prototype of menus based on Material UI, and the regular cycle of dependency updates.

mattermost : https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp

On the web platform end, beside being overwhelmed by anticipation of the upcoming new joiners, we’re making good progress in getting webpack federation ready to be merged. This will be a solid step towards the multi-product architecture on the front-end. The upgrade to React 17 is also almost there. Beyond that, as mentioned, we’re fixing a few issues in GraphQL before we enable it again on community.

On the web platform end, we are experimenting with “theme weeks” as a budgeting hack to work on important but not urgent stuff. This first theme week (and this will likely be a recurring one) is focused on 🥁 performance! We’re pulling in a whole bunch of tickets accumulated over time of smaller things we can optimize for performance. Some of these improvements are already landing.

Platform involves work in many of our “highest traffic” repositories. I’m still figuring out reasonable ways how to keep up with what’s happening in the webapp, server, mobile repos as well as everything related to QA.

Most projects on GitHub have CONTRIBUTING.md file which describes how you can contribute, so you can start from there. Generally I'd say getting to meaningful contributions is very difficult for someone without real-world development experience, so if you choose to do this it won't be easy. On the other hand, this is precisely why employers prefer people who already have this experience -- it takes time and effort and not everyone makes it even with support from senior collegues.

Mattermost was the closest I was able to find and until their cloud beta finishes you have to setup a server to run them. With a Github or Google identity you are one click away from running Uclusion (and with any email several clicks) - no credit card required.

ExcaliDraw - https://excalidraw.com/

ExcaliDraw

However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw.

Fun fact: I used GA in Excalidraw, and it's still powering some of the interactions! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/blob/master/package...

I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!"

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.

Sketch easy and go back to work...

https://excalidraw.com/