Engineering Elegance

What I Did This week, I started working on the Rank Emcee module. Before implementing the feature, I spent some time understanding how bulk updates in CouchDB work so I could apply the correct approach when updating multiple performances simultaneously. I successfully developed the core components of the module: During testing, I also discovered two existing issues in the original Emcee module. The first was that the timer did not stop correctly when a performance state changed externally, and the Read more

Feeling This Week This week was different from my previous weeks because I was not focused on completing a specific technical task. Instead, I spent time thinking about what I wanted to learn next and how I could contribute more meaningfully during the remainder of my internship. Even during my leave for the Hari Raya Haji celebration, I found myself reflecting on possible internship project ideas. Since most of my assigned GitHub tasks had already been completed, I felt motivated Read more

Successfully Merging the Debounce LLM Buttons PR This week, I successfully merged the PR for the Debounce LLM Buttons feature. During the review process, Dr. Shawn pointed out an important software engineering principle regarding error handling. Initially, I was detecting Gemini API rate limits through string processing and regular expressions by searching for keywords in the error message. However, Dr. Shawn explained that this approach is fragile because human-readable messages can change at any time. Instead, I should parse the Read more

Fixing the Classbar Crash Issue This week, I successfully fixed the classbar crash issue that happened during polling updates. After debugging and tracing the issue carefully, I found that the problem came from how VenueObj was being compared. Previously, the comparison used rev, but every time polling refreshed the data from CouchDB, the rev value changed even though it was still the same venue. Because of that, the dropdown could no longer match the selected venue correctly and caused the Read more

Hitting a Block and Rethinking the Approach This week, I was still struggling to figure out how to properly fix and implement the moderator part in the emcee module. During the weekly meeting, Dr. Shawn suggested that I redo everything from a cleaner starting point. I also realized that I wasn’t fully confident with my current implementation, which made the decision to restart feel necessary. Starting Fresh (The Right Way) After Dr. Shawn reset the repository, I began by upgrading Read more