There are days when I doubt the roadmap, so to speak. Not because I think I’m necessarily going in the wrong direction, but because I wonder if I’ve made things harder for myself for no apparent gain.
Only those who follow these devlogs closely (there may be one living being that does) know that I’m working on revamping—yet again—the backend for . I’m not doing this because the current system isn’t working. It is, more or less. But in hindsight, there are elements of the legacy code that could be improved. And sometimes, rewriting makes more sense than fixing.
For those not into code, I imagine this sounds absurd. Like burning down a house just to reuse the nails. It doesn’t make sense at first glance. But, believe it or not, that was once a real practice.
The current flow we use on has, at least in my opinion, several weak points. For one, it requires posting authority from users, which can be a deal breaker. On top of that, core functions—like scheduling, manual posting, and publishing to Hive—are handled through a collection of scripts.
These scripts are triggered by cron jobs, which is just nerd talk for: they run on timers.
What I’m building now is a more loosely coupled design. In practical terms, this means that any front end—not just a video platform—could interact with it. That alone is a win I didn’t fully appreciate when I started this rewrite. But more importantly, it would turn into a true Hive front end, rather than something adjacent to it, as it is today.
I’m aware this might only make sense to me, but I can defend the point.
I also know better than to make big changes in one swoop, and truth be told, I’m in no rush. As I said, things are working. But once the switch happens, almost everything I’ve built will need revisiting—from the encoder to the monitoring tools. Calling it a “major refactor” is like calling dirt… dirty.
But the big “why” is what matters most.
We’ve made it a goal to turn into a business. A goal that, I’ll admit, only recently started to feel achievable. When it’s all said and done—and that may still take a few months—not a single line of legacy code will remain. More importantly, we’ll be able to reorganize our hardware and allocate resources far more efficiently.
Still, this process will be slow. It has to be.
Like that old video of people moving an entire building, inch by inch.
-MenO