2023-05-30 Front End Team meeting

At a high level, what should we focus on right now?

• We should prioritize features
• We shouldn’t take up any big refactoring right now because we lack a clear picture for the product work that we’d like to take up in the coming year. Once we get a clearer picture, we can consider taking up some of the refactoring becaus we’ll be better informed of our direction.

What we’re working on

• Rajat: i18n, which should last a while. Filling in gaps with PR review and smaller work.
• Pavish: vacation soon. Hoping to take up a new project upon returning from vacation. Hoping to decide on that project within the next week. Considering sharable forms and sharable tables/explorations.
• Sean: Will need a new project in the next week or two. Not sure what it will be yet.

Front end performance project

• Pavish was planning to work on this, but has decided to defer it in favor of feature-related work
• Perf problems:
  • impact loading and scrolling
  • impact dev mode more the prod mode
  • are worse with lots of columns
• Fixing the perf problems will require significant refactoring, and it would be nice to take that refactoring work up once we have a better idea of the other features we plan to build

Potential feature work

• Explorations. Lots to improve here, but we need more user input for this.
• Sean: charts/graphs
  • Pavish: We need to understand more about the product direction
  • Sean: chicken/egg problem
  • Rajat: also interested in this
• file/image types

Potential refactoring to do later

• Rajat: some work on sheet selection
  • clarify UX specs, adding more detail
  • refactor code to use better data structures which are less prone to bugs
  • Sean: agree. This has been our the most bug-prone area of our front end code
• Pavish: Stores refactor.
  • It’s been hard for new contributors to make PRs that follow our patterns.
  • We’ll need to discuss this in depth
• Pavish: Reduce requests by combining them via new endpoints

Other topics we should discuss soon

• Sean: “Granular vs coarse reactivity”
  • We decided to schedule this topic for the next meeting
• Rajat: Testing.
  • We’ll plan a separate meeting for this.
• We also did a quick pass over the numerous other small agenda items and agreed that none of them are pressing enough to discuss soon.

Next meeting

• Scheduled for 2023-06-30