On May 8th, the small dev team building the new AllTheFlavors.com (ATF) unleashed v2.0 onto the world. It’s been kind of a bumpy ride, but a success for the most part. I’ve mostly been the backend architect, building a Node.js powered GraphQL API, supported by PostgreSQL. I’m very happy with the API, but I feel like the client-side SPA using it wasn’t quite ready for primetime. We’ve spent the last 3 weeks fixing bugs and trying to shore up issues that tend to not show up until thousands of people are using it. I can say for sure that Safari is the new IE. It has by far brought the most issues and oddities. We’re steadily fixing things and overall I think the launch has gone well.
As the other developers continue to fix UI issues, I will soon begin pushing into ATF 2.1 and preparing the API for 2.2. The next 3 of 4, incremental versions, beginning with 2.1, will bring about a lot of new functionality. 2.0 added the ability to create formulations with different ingredients and then mix those formulations with flavor recipes. In the past, those flavor recipes could only be used to make e-liquid, but now we can make candles, drinks, pretty much anything. I can’t really go into a lot of details, but we plan to expand the community aspect of ATF and try to create more social involvement. We also want to provide features for vendors and for the streamers who use the site during their streams. That’s just 2.1 to 2.2, we have a lot of stuff on our roadmap.
Overall, I’m happy with where it is, but, still, I feel like we should have gone with server side rendering, instead of the SPA. That’s just my personal belief, the SPA is holding up fine, for the most part. I’ll discuss more about 2.1 as I build it over the next couple of months.