---
title: "August Status Update"
date: 2020-08-22
draft: false
series: 
  - status
---

August shifted back from a meta month onto a more even balance with development.
For Hackagotchi, I worked on the new websocket backend to allow for real-time
updates to player's hacksteads, as well as started maintaining the new chat
backend, Gotchinet. In other news, I've begun to move the FLL-Scoring codebase
into a monolithic app.
<!--more-->

## Hackagotchi
### Backend
Cedric[^1] spent a few weeks working on a new Websocket API called "The
Wormhole". This will allow for our new non-Slack clients to receive real-time
updates from our central backend, at a significant increase to our current
client.

Moving to our own backend is essential to eliminating the limitations imposed by
Slack, including an issue that's been plaguing our players, namely that
sometimes Hacksteads would fail to display, because of Slack limiting the amount
of "Blocks" we can send to an app Home.

### Gotchinet
Part of moving away from Slack is providing our own chat platform. Communication
is such an integral part of the game, and I want to drive the creation of a
community around Hackagotchi.

I've created an IRC[^2] network for Hackagotchi, that is planned to be
integrated directly into the standalone clients. The dev team has already moved
over to it and we're writing documentation to help our existing playerbase move
over (something we're expecting to be made easier by the standalone client
integration). You're welcome to come on and chat on [KiwiIRC][kiwiirc-gotchinet]

## FLL-Scoring
I've had some time to think since the last time I made a commit to the codebase,
and in that time I've realized that making this app decentralized doesn't make
sense like it does for, say, SourceHut, in which each service isn't tied to any
other except the meta service. In FLL-Scoring, however, each service will be
tied to another. You can't have a Scoreboard without a Tournament, you can't
have Teams without Tournaments, etc. As such, I'm going to be continuing
development of the FLL-Scoring app as a monolithic app.

My goals haven't changed much though, I still want to build a fast and reliable
app with minimal JavaScript. I still believe that's possible and I will
continuing working until it's done.

[kiwiirc-gotchinet]:
https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/#irc://irc.hackagotch.io:+6697/gotchi

[^1]: Lead developer for Hackagotchi
[^2]: Internet Relay Chat. Old and venerated text-based communication tech,
built on an [open standard](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459).