2024-03-04: Back to square one
Tags: devjournal
Published: 2024-03-05 00:56:04

Last week was my first week working part-time during this stint. The company is in pretty dire financial straits, so I'm only able to work 14 hours a week. I had spaced it out so I would work 3.5 hours a day since Friday I had a funeral to go to. I also am apparently not able to continue part-time work for this coming week since the backpay situation still needs to be settled and the investors don't want to continue funding till then. Either way, I'm looking for a new job.

Because I had such little time to work, I was just kind of fixing smaller bugs here and there since anything too big would take a really long time.

My first task of the week was making it so that any of our legacy purchasers would be able to use the application without having to sign up for a trial. The way the onboarding is currently set up, there's a consistent handshake of "commands" between the frontend and the backend that had to be completed on each step in order to finish the whole thing.

Because of this, I had to create a shortcut for the onboarding when it detects a legacy subscription. That was simple enough to code up as an if statement, but the challenge was making sure it went through the steps in order, and more importantly, made sense. With this mind, I had to change some of the wording for the bot responses and also spend a couple of hours making sure everything was working fine. I also had to mock a legacy subscription.

Once I confirmed that was all in working order, I pushed it out to production and got started on my next task, which was integrating our new support system into the website. We decided to use Intercom instead of HubSpot. With this, I added functionality for the previous help button, instead of linking to a HubSpot form, to open up a messenger window for Intercom support. This was relatively straightforward, just hooking up the buttons correctly.

After I pushed that out to production, my task was to make a pop-up for when guided exercises are disabled (show the payment screen in a modal) since I had made it so that the sidebar pages are no longer disabled. We also noticed that the pricing page stays the same regardless of if it's on trial or not so I deigned to fix that as well.

The first thing I got done was creating a backend function to tell if a user has not begun a trial, begun, fully paying, or expired. I managed to stick this new field into the JSON that gets returned to the frontend with all the rest of the user data. I then got to work on the frontend, making sure the text would updated based off what it receives from the backend. 

Also, because prior to this, all our user data queries were just getting polled from the backend every 10-30 seconds, I created a new Svelte store for the user data so it doesn't have to spam it for data. I only got to implement it for this new pricing page, though. 

Either way, it was pulling the data fine, and updating the text to match the data, but I learned that the backend function wasn't actually providing the proper trial status, and that's where I left off on Thursday. Friday, as I said, I couldn't work due to the funeral.

And since I'm not continuing to work for Comigo until that contract gets reinstated, I will probably have to leave that unfinished, unfortunately. In the meantime, I will keep this blog updated with my personal projects once I start on something new. I may continue the Tetris thing, but there is also that calorie counter. I will have to decide.

Until next time, cheers.