SN Journey Day 1

I'm an economist who's always liked computery stuff. I consider myself to be of "medium" technical proficiency. I know my way around a Linux. I've run a Bitcoin and Lightning node raw from command line. I've contributed code to tech companies, mostly data science and machine learning stuff using Python and SQL. I use R and Python every day for research, but no experience in Javascript or developing web apps. Still consider myself very green in many of the areas that would be needed to contribute to SN. So this will be a learning journey for me.

My primary interest in helping with SN development is to better understand its database and analytics stack. I would like to contribute to developing more detailed and customizable analytics dashboards, so Stackers can better understand things like territory metrics, platform growth, and maybe even what makes for a good post.

In the longer run, if @k00b would be willing to open SN's historical data to me, I'd like to be able to conduct some academic research on the economics of discussion forums with micropayments. It's a pretty unique marketplace we have here, and there are surely some interesting insights to be derived.

First things first, I navigate to the SN Github repo: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news. It tell me to install Docker so I do that.

I'm on a Windows (don't hate me, i'm just working from my home desktop.) So i get Docker Desktop for Windows. I have to install WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). No problem, everything goes smoothly.

Next, I git clone https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news from the Windows terminal and run ./sndev start. Didn't work, looks like Windows Terminal can't run shell scripts? If it can, I don't know how.

No worries, I'll just open up Ubuntu on Windows and work from a virtual linux environment. I clone the repo, hit ./sndev start, and the dev environment begins setting itself up.

The first thing I notice is the cool progress bars:

Then, as I watch the log keep going, it dawned on me the complexity of this project. This isn't just some web app, it's a web app that is dealing with real money transactions and it needs to be integrated with a live lightning node while constantly querying the Bitcoin blockchain. I'm a total noob when it comes to app development, and the first thing I try to dip my toes into is this?? Will I be able to get this thing actually working?

After a few minutes, it looks like everything finished setting up and the service is running. So I point my browser to localhost:3000 and sure enough, I get a running Stacker.News app populated with a bunch of example posts. Success!

Since I'm primarily interested in analytics, I go to the analytics page. Based on this, example registrations go back to 6/22 and example activity mostly goes back a few months; though there are a miniscule number of posts going back to '22.

This leaves me wondering what populates the example database for the SN dev environment. I'm sure I'll find it in the codebase if I look hard enough.

Well, I think that's enough for now. I have to take my kid out to swimming (trust me, I'd rather be coding.) Sadly, I probably only have an hour or two a week to look at this, at most. So we'll see if I ever manage to actually contribute anything. But I'll keep posting whenever I get back to it. Setting goals for myself, my next steps are probably the following:

Wish me luck...