TBA now fully running on python3!

[plnyyanks]

It’s been a couple years since my last post about this , but we’ve finally completed the long tail of all the legacy endpoints on the old python2 and we finally turned off the servers for the old version this week!

The new-and-improved python3 version TBA has been running (increasingly) incrementally in prod for a while now, and the codebase and developer experience are substantially higher quality than in the old version. And we’re proud to have done it generally transparently along the way!

We’ve written a tech talk blog post about the overall process behind the migration, and how important it is to be able to cut over the site incrementally.

I want to give a huge thanks to everyone who contributed to the migration and keeping the lights on at TBA - expand the section below for the git shortlog for the last few years:

Summary

     8  AGPapa
     1  Abhay Shukla
     2  Alan
     4  Andrew Dassonville
    17  Andrew Ke
     1  Blake Bourque
     3  Caleb Denio
     1  Cheru Berhanu
     1  EmreAdabag
   244  Eugene Fang
     3  Greg Marra
     1  Greg Stanton Marra
     1  Jack R
     4  Jared Hasen-Klein
    19  Jordan Miller
     1  Josh Bacon
    11  Justin
     6  Justin Tervay
     1  Kim Flynn
     2  Michael Leong
     4  Ofek Ashery
   357  Phil Lopreiato
   243  Zachary Orr
     1  bovlb
     1  gaming
     1  julianewberry

The Blue Alliance is also a nonprofit organization and relies on volunteer efforts and donations from the community to keep the site running

[marshall]

@plnyyanks

cut over the site incrementally.

Blessed be the architects.

[plnyyanks]

@marshall

Blessed be the architects.

The best migration is the one you didn’t notice

[Christopher149]

Is there a timeline when the “team search nearby” feature will be fixed, seeing as the github issue comments make it seem like it needed a port to python 3?
https://www.thebluealliance.com/nearby?search_type=teams

[EricH]

There was a migration?

[Eugene_Fang]

You’re right, that’s something that was overlooked in the migration to py3. The way nearby search was implemented was difficult to maintain (and not supported by the py3 runtime), we hope to bring it back at some point but I’d like to figure out how to make it easier to maintain.

[joemost]

Nice!

Do you guys do any static rendering of TBA? feels like server side rendering is the next big frontier of web.

Also, is this a full time job? Such a massive project that gets so widely used, would hope the developers are able to make some solid money off of it.

[jtrv]

@joemost

Do you guys do any static rendering of TBA? feels like server side rendering is the next big frontier of web.

There has been some chatter. I’ll be running some experiments this fall but you should not expect to actually see anything on this front for the 2024 season.

@joemost

Also, is this a full time job? Such a massive project that gets so widely used, would hope the developers are able to make some solid money off of it.

Everyone is a volunteer. Phil, Eugene, Zach, and Greg all have full time day jobs. The server costs are sponsored and partially covered by merch.

[Eugene_Fang]

@jtrv

partially covered by merch

Merch is sold at-cost

[s-neff]

Should prob put the TBA Patreon or kofi or whatever it is as a link on the Amazon product and on the thanks sponsors page

[swurl]

@joemost

feels like server side rendering is the next big frontier of web.

Next frontier? I think websites did this before JavaScript existed, and websites today that don’t use client-side code like JS also are effectively using server side rendering.

Unless you’re talking about something else?

[cadandcookies]

Everything old is new again, time is a flat circle…

[joemost]

okay, semantics… there a lot of client side rendering these days. And the difference is sites will now render as much of that JS to static html as it can.

[joemost]

Good stuff! Really appreciate all the hardwork. I feel like a use TBA daily during competition season

[swurl]

Can’t beat the basics. Those old websites with the yellow or blue backgrounds were always the best.

[cadandcookies]

Usage Statistics and Market Share of Server-side Programming Languages for...

[alst]

TBA doesn’t currently do much client-side rendering at all. There is a small amount of JS for client-side features like search suggestions, and a bit more in the event wizard. Most of the rest is rendered on the backend with Jinja templates.

[joemost]

More talking about JS frameworks getting smarter and smarter about being able to server side render ( Server-side rendering is having a moment | InfoWorld ). It has become a big push on the web with frameworks like Next.js bypassing Vanilla React (which I think React itself at this points the most widely used framework?). Search Engines prefer the faster load speed. A little while ago some of these optimizations had to be more seeked out. It is a new developing front that previously wasn’t as popular. Maybe Next Frontier is not the correct word, but its definitely become a big push.

But, as the TBA devs pointed out most of their sites are static HTML anyways. Not sure why I thought it would even have much JS to begin with. Was just a comment I made in passing.

[swurl]

Love to see more SSR. Having CSR in the first place was a big mistake, loading pages on some sites took up 25MB and half of that was JS. Good on TBA for sticking with static HTML!