The History of Ren Bot

Where We Are Now

Now that we’re back to the present, there’s still a lot of things to be done. As someone working full time, the amount of time I have to spend on Ren has significantly reduced. Fortunately, with new and younger members of SAD becoming interested to work on Ren, new requests can now be split amongst them instead. This also means the way we’re doing things is slowly changing adapting.

One of the things that I didn’t really touch upon here was automated testing. Testing is a very important part to verify whether things work. Much of the testing we’ve done is quite manual, and as such, can be error prone. With v3 migration out of the way now, my focus is to explore how we can introduce automated testing into Ren so that we can verify our cogs. That way, we can reduce the burden of us having to test everything manually ourselves when we make a change.

Another thing we’ve started to do is maintaining documents. With more people working on things, having documents outlining a cog’s purpose and its implementation details is crucial in order for people to be on the same page. It’s something I learned from work, and is really nice to have in a side project as well. It also makes it easier for people to pick up where you left off. For example, take a look at u/renservermanage.

The one thing that hasn’t changed, and I anticipate will not change in the foreseeable future, is the fact that Ren is a side project. When I picked it up in 2016, one of my goals was to have it help me land a job after finishing school, which, in retrospect did have some sort of contributing factor. This was an avenue for me to learn from both my successes and mistakes, and with others joining to help, I hope it continues to serve a similar purpose. Working on Ren should be challenging, but fun for those who decide to take it upon themselves. Nobody asks you to work on it, nor do you get paid for it; you’re here to work on it on your own volition. This is why I tend not to put a lot of pressure on people to get things done. Instead, I try to frame it as a way for people to learn in hopes of motivating people to tackle the issues we’re faced with.

Anyways, this has been a really long post that I’ve split across several days of writing. If you made it here, thanks for sticking along. I hope this post has given some insight as to what sorts of things we work on for Ren, what goes on behind the scenes, and perhaps motivate you to join in on the fun if you are inclined. 🙂

Until next time!
~Lui

References

For those interested in playing around with things:

• SFU Anime Club GitHub
  • Ren v2
  • Ren v3
  • YOURLS
• SFU Anime Club Server Status