Hey there friends, I kept getting followers on the defunct #Readlebee account, so I decided to go ahead and migrate all those followers here!

This will essentially be a helper account for my primary @robbie@devs.live account, boosting relevant #software posts from there and generally be a platform for me to write about #webDev specifically. Maybe I'll move here fully someday?

If you don't want that, feel free to unfollow! I know you originally followed for Readlebee and I fully understand 💖

I recently joined a Goodreads alternative on the Fediverse, but of course... I forgot its name. Anyone know what it could be? It wasn't Bookwyrm or Readlebee.

#AskFedi #Bookwyrm #Readlebee

Alright, I'm starting in a minute! Join me at https://live.alamantus.com to chat, or hop on PeerTube to just watch here:
https://diode.zone/videos/watch/6323b319-935b-47b9-90ae-d7c2892bb10e

#Readlebee #webdev #liveStream

Ok, tonight I'm going to do a #Readlebee dev stream FOR REAL tonight at 8 pm Mountain Standard Time (2 hours from now)! Gonna get to work on making status updates and progress work!

I'll post a link to the stream(s) closer to when I'm starting, so stay tuned!

Alright, I'm planning to start live streaming some #Readlebee dev work in about 40 minutes at roughly 7:20pm Mountain Standard Time (that's the time zone in Denver, Colorado). That should give me just enough time to set up OBS and everything on my new computer...

I'll post a link when I go live, but it'll be on this PeerTube channel:
https://diode.zone/video-channels/robbie_live/

I'm thinking of doing a #Readlebee dev live stream later today. It's gonna be extremely boring and probably consist of only dependency updates, but maybe I'll actually get some UI stuff done too, who knows!

I'll probably be streaming on diode.zone, and I'll update again if I end up actually doing it!

Hey so I JUST got an email about new progress tracking features in The #StoryGraph (https://www.thestorygraph.com/), and it's finally pretty much exactly what I've been looking for in a #Goodreads #alternative!

I'm still going to be developing #Readlebee because the name is way better and I have some good ideas for it (and it's FLOSS), but you should definitely try out The StoryGraph in the meantime because it's pretty excellent so far!

Me, the developer of #Readlebee:
Ugh, god, when the hell is Readlebee going to be ready? I want to use it so badly!

@tripofmice @nilesh Yeah, that seems like it could be beneficial. Maybe even the devs at @inventaire, since #Readlebee will be initially only be pulling book data from there.

Ah, I think I finally understand Server-Side Rendering for JS frameworks, so I suppose I ought to do that for #Readlebee so it doesn't just load a blank page if someone has JavaScript turned off on their browser.

It's been about 1 year since I started working on @Readlebee, so I wrote a blog post about my experience so far:

https://robbie.antenesse.net/2020/09/11/one-year-of-readlebee.html

TL;DR: the development process is very different than what I'm used to because I'm trying to do it "right," and that slow process has been discouraging, but I'm hopeful that I'll get something to show for my work relatively soon.

#Readlebee #webdev #floss

I tend to pre-write a bunch of code without testing it each step of the way. Most of the time it works just fine and how I want, but with some of the stuff I wrote for #Readlebee earlier, it did not lol

Thank goodness I'm also good at debugging my stuff! 😅

I'm excited to get back to working on #Readlebee so I can share book reviews more easily here... Unfortunately, I'm going to have to finish the actual app before I add #ActivityPub support because I'm still a little hazy on getting the protocol completely working.

@shine Ahhh, I see now! For some reason, cybre.space never showed @feld's replies to my post, so I was confused lol.

But yeah! #Readlebee is the project I was talking about that uses the Inventaire API, and @Readlebee is the account I created to talk about it! It's still in very early development, but the goal is what an awful lot of people are looking for: a federated Goodreads alternative. Still a ways to go, but this #ActivityPub question has been good training so far, at least.

Readlebee is a planned free open source alternative to Amazon's Goodreads, and is currently under development:

@Readlebee

Developers can contribute to Readlebee at:
https://gitlab.com/Alamantus/Readlebee

Non-developers can contribute to Readlebee by adding to the Inventaire open database of books (which Readlebee uses):
https://wiki.inventaire.io/wiki/How-to-contribute

#ReadleBee #Goodreads #Books #Book #Alternatives #FLOSS #FOSS

Now that I'm finally just focusing on getting #Readlebee to a presentable state instead of worrying about late-stage problems, I'm actually making headway again! I'm about halfway through shelf management!

Ok so I need to just build the fucking app just like every other app I make and worry about federation and all this extra shit I've been worrying about. I'm going to stop worrying about what's "best" and just finally *DO IT* and then clean it up later because I'm tired of having this burden of not having anything presentable because I'm frozen in fear of doing something wrong.

It's time to get stuff done and tidy it up later.

#Readlebee

Ugh what's wrong with me. I keep going back and forth on #Readlebee dev concepts—should I build the front and back end together to make it easier to understand how they interact, or should I build out the back end and API completely and build the front end with what's available in mind? Should I use Swagger to make sure the API is easily readable /first/ or should I just document the API when it's done?

I'm so tired of not knowing the "best" way to do things.

I'm realizing just /how much/ help I'm going to need on the #Readlebee project... this is a very large task, and I'm really going to need help implementing features beyond the barebones functionality of book tracking, comments, and reviews. The concept of federations is overwhelming me at this moment, so I'm really hoping that some people will be able to come to my aid when the time comes.

I'm primarily a front end developer, and all this back end stuff is torture!

I just spent all of tonight and most of this morning contributing to and improving the `sequelize-erd` project specifically so I could visualize the database structure I've set up for #Readlebee so far:

https://gitlab.com/Alamantus/Readlebee/blob/master/server/sequelize/db-diagram.svg

In the end, it was very worth it because it showed not just the /structure/, but also how Sequelize /interprets/ what I set up, so I was able to fix a bunch of errors because of it! 🥳