SteemSpectacles.com is live and open source! - Here's how the code works, and how you can contribute (if you want)

Finally! Yesterday @sjennon and I launched SPECTACLES, the Follower Tracking App we've been working very hard on for the past few weeks. It's far from finished, but it's a good start and we've already received a lot of positive feedback as well as many great suggestions.

Give it a try yourself on www.steemspectacles.com or read our introduction post.

Now that it's finally public, I figured it would be nice to also open up the source code for inspection and contributions. I love the idea of Open Source projects, and I'll warmly welcome anyone who wants to submit a change, no matter how trivial.

The project can be found here: https://github.com/stephanmullerNL/spectacles

The code

First of all, while have a couple of years experience as a web developer there's still a lot of things that I don't know or have little experience in. The stack used in Spectacles (Angular 4, Bootstrap and SteemJS) is quite new to me. If you see me make a mistake or think something could be improved, please let me know! I'm always looking to learn more :)

Angular 4

After working with AngularJS (up to 1.6) it was fun to finally explore the newer Angular. It took some getting used to, but I'm quite enjoying it so far. It has some interesting improvements, and although technically separate from Angular (but hard to see the two apart) I found it very nice to use TypeScript as well.

I completely neglected to add unit tests and e2e tests, mainly because I knew I was going to refactor everything very often but also because I'm lazy. I know that if I would like people to contribute I should at least make sure the basics are properly tested. Soon, hopefully 😬.

SteemJS

To fetch data from the Steem blockchain I use steemjs. It's the only complete API in JavaScript that can give me all the info I need, but I have to say it still leaves a lot to be desired. Its documentation is quite lacking, and the way the different kinds of data need to be requested are weirdly distributed.

_{Loading http://www.steemspectacles.com/@ned takes 157 websocket frames, which takes some time to load.}

As a random example, to get the reputation of someone's followers you first need to fetch the user's follower names and then make a separate call to get the profiles of those users. To calculate their SP you need to do a separate call to get Steemit's global variables as well. This is pretty inefficient. For now I'll just have to make do, but it makes the app pretty slow sometimes.

Bootstrap 4

I chose Bootstrap because it enabled me to get a layout working pretty fast. I'm still not sure if I like it. Sometimes I feel like it takes more work configuring Bootstrap to look the way I want than it would take me to write it myself. For now I'll just stick to it though.

The Challenges

The main challenge I encountered was fetching the data from Steem using SteemJS. This challenge was twofold:

• Figuring out how to use SteemJS, which endpoints it provides and what data they return
• Loading a lot of data without making the app feel extremely slow

For the first challenge I found a lot of help on Steemit.chat, in the #dev and #steemjs channels. Thanks, everyone who answered my many questions! A special thanks goes to @jfollas for his excellent tutorials. You're the man 👊.

The second challenge was an interesting one. Take for example the app's dashboard which requires the following API calls:

• Your user profile
• Your follower/following count
• The user profiles for all your followers (could be thousands in case of whales)
• Your latest 100 posts and comments
• All the replies to your latest posts and comments (could be hundreds easily)

To make sure the app didn't feel too slow, I fetch some of the data before resolving a page (mainly your user profile and follower count). Then I render the page and start fetching all your posts and comments as well as all the names of your followers. Once those are in I can start fetching all the replies to your posts and comments, and the user profiles of all your followers. Those last bits are what I need to calculate the full statistics.

_{Promiseception aka room for improvement.}

Because of the dependencies between calls I do some things in promises, but for the final calls I use Observables. That way I can already render the dashboard and show loading icons, and when the results are finally in it inserts them into the page. I'm pretty sure I can also improve the performance of rendering all the data onto the screen, but I haven't yet had the time to look into that.

In short, right now it all feels like a big mess. Again, if anyone knows a better way please educate me!

Next up

Spectacles is far from done! Here's some of the things that we want to add:

• Stats about the people you follow
• Stats about people who don't follow you but still interact wit you
• Stats about when people started (or stopped) following you

However, for some of those the SteemJS API is not sufficient. So one of the things I'll be working on in the near future is a new API. That might sound ambitious, but I think I should be able to make a basic, read-only API that gives a lot more useful information. Stay tuned for updates on that!

Contributing

Again, feel free to fork Spectacles and create pull requests. If they're going to be big maybe it's better to shoot me a message first, but I'm open to all kinds of contributions! I'll make sure to make the project easier to work on, by creating a better folder structure, adding documentation and tests and a detailed contributions.md file.

Questions?

I can be reached here in the comments, on steemit.chat in #spectacles (or through private messages) or if you want on stephanmullernl@gmail.com.

Stay tuned for more updates on Spectacles itself and on the development process!