Blog by Piotr Banaszkiewicz

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AMY release v1.5

Development of AMY in February had seen a boost due to my winter break (I graduated university and had about a month of free time before MSc studies started), and that ended with today’s release of v1.5.

AMY's development chart AMY’s development chart shows a peak in February 2016. (click to enlarge)

Experiment

This time I decided to carry out a small experiment: I broke the month-long release cycle by deploying a v1.5.0-dev around February 15th.

There were some big changes already in the develop so I was hoping to get feedback on them and fix any issues in time for March.

Unfortunately I don’t think anyone used them yet, since I hear nothing about them.

Bug fixes

The number of bug-fixes for this release is higher than for v1.4, but it’s still considerably smaller than number of features :-)

Here are fixed bugs:

  • Django Rest Framework erroring URLs were removed (still not sure what caused them to error-out)
  • dashboard and workshop issues now show only active (== not stalled, not marked as complete) events
  • workshop issues was extended by providing a list of workshops without any assigned instructors
  • a rare error when looking someone up was fixed
  • API throttle rates have been increased
  • current and upcoming events on the dashboard are now based off of published events.

New features

The biggest new features for this release:

  • new workshops requests once accepted are linked to resulting events
  • admins now can submit invoices from AMY
  • admins can now receive event submissions (this should work really well for self-organized workshops that already have a workshop page)

Other changes:

  • badge details view allows for filtering
  • development and production software was updated
  • production assets (JavaScript and CSS files) are now compressed and served with unique name
  • persons merging was reworked and is now a lot better
  • it’s possible to find duplicates in the database now
  • base templates were renamed to lower confusion
  • API returns award date for every person for every badge
  • added CSV renderer to some API endpoint for exporting members
  • debrief was renamed and also allows for CSV export
  • Award model gained awarded_by field pointing to the person responsible for awarding a badge
  • person lookup in some places now works for “Name Lastname” pattern too.

Changes contributed by Greg Wilson:

  • CSV export of instructor completion rates
  • CSV export of missing instructor certificates

(Yes, Greg’s responsible for training new instructors.)

Next release

This was the last month of prof. Ethan White’s support of AMY’s development and I’d like to thank him a lot for the almost half-year long generous support. It definitely helped me work on AMY.

Since I’ve just started Master’s programme, and it’s very challenging, I’ll be slowing down the development pace. That’s also the reason why v1.6 doesn’t have a deadline (yet).

In the queue there are some very interesting changes to be made. To name a few:

  • generating certificates for people from AMY
  • checking-in workshop attendees from AMY
  • having a cronjob look over all workshop pages to find out if they were updated

AMY is probably also facing a database migration to PostgreSQL at one point (but rather sooner than later).