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studio status report: 2022-03

month 3 of 2022 was about learning how to use Elmish components and quitting the day-job

I did not quit my day job in order to work on the project that I have been working on for the last five months. That would not be a wise financial decision. And there really is no need for me go into detail about why I quit. The essentialist question to ask is, Did my day job have anything to do with current Studio work? And my answer is, Not really. Nevertheless, the gig was a great learning experience until is wasn’t.

Meanwhile back in the Studio, I made a commit that represents a new understanding of not just how to use Bolero.ElmishComponent<_,_> but how to package Bolero.ElmishComponent<_,_> types in a separate F# project for the sake of reusability. I intend to write about this hard-won revelation soon but, in the mean time, let us remind ourselves that an Elmish program defines a conventional update-view cycle with an expression like this:

Program.mkProgram init update view

This may seem obvious to every other Elmish developer on Earth but it was not clear to me that Bolero.ElmishComponent<_,_> does not have its own update-view cycle. Hey Bryan: there is only one update-view cycle and it is on the Elmish Program level. What this means (super-obviously) is that, yes, we can define a view function on the Elmish Component level but it must be ‘chained’ to the Program-level view function. However, trying to make an update function on the Elmish Component level held me up for days. The elegant simplicity was overwhelming! This commit I made represents the realization that an updateModel function was needed (for my design) instead of a child update function—again, I’ll explain why later.

month 3 of 2022 was also about learning how to use webpack to release JavaScript libraries for CDNs

Retrospectively, is makes sense that first thing most webpack users would do is bundle a JavaScript library for CDN usage with, say, unpkg. Here in Bryan-world, this is like the last thing I am doing with webpack. For example, my songhay library, was originally intended to be compiled/bundled in a TypeScript project. So webpack was originally needed for its generation of *.d.ts files for the Typescript-project IDE experience. My secondary need for webpack is to bundle the output of these Typescript projects into one minimized file for production release.

It was not until this month that I realized the super obvious: I could not use songhay on a site like CodePen—and I needed CodePen to help me with my Bolero work, prototyping the responsive thumbnail experience for the b-roll player. On CodePen, I modified this experience by starting with:

  1. thumbnails with jQuery
  2. thumbnails with modern, native JavaScript
  3. thumbnails with the songhay library

Now I can experiment with #3 by translating it into Bolero. CodePen can finally see songhay with this URI: https://unpkg.com/songhay@0.3.1/dist/songhay.js. This was all made possible with the following webpack.config.js setting:

const outputLibraryConfig = {
    library: {
        name: 'rx',
        type: 'var',
    },
};

As of this writing, the webpack folks document output.library under the configuration section of their documentation. When a novice first uses webpack, they might read the concepts section of the documentation and never see output.library (which is what I did).

selected Studio notes from month 3

Bolero: more examples of Bolero.ElmishComponent<_,_>

Search: https://github.com/search?l=F%23&p=2&q=ElmishComponent&type=Code

The Elmish update-view calls are top-level only. I have not found an example of some kind of nested update-view cycle on the Bolero.ElmishComponent<_,_> level.

MovingLineSvg.fs [GitHub]: top-level view pushes top-level model to two Bolero.ElmishComponent<_,_> types. Very straight forward.

fsharp-wasm-static-demo/src/GitHubUser/Main.fs [GitHub]: ecomp<_,_,_> is being called from top-level view.

StatsBot/src/StatsBot.Client/Components.Main.fs [GitHub]: an interesting use of components.

EsBankAccount/View/Notify.fs [GitHub]: top-level view calls child, Bolero.ElmishComponent<_,_> view functions.

Typescript in the Studio is not professional

Precious hours were lost yesterday because I failed to step back and determine whether the Typescript pipelines/stacks were professional: there appears to be no coherent, organized usage of Typescript.

It appears that my primary Typescript goals is to expose a JavaScript library with TypeScript types for consumption in Angular (TypeScript) projects (which is kind of weird because Typescript is being compiled to JavaScript to be consumed in Typescript projects). My usage of unpkg.com exposes the fact that I am not packaging bundles (minimized and not) with webpack.

Wow. There are over 94 tsconfig*.json files (which I find hard to believe), according to GitHub. I can start with ignoring tsconfig.spec.json and tsconfig.e2e.json for the time being and first look at my latest tsconfig*.json files:

  • tsconfig.json in songhay-core ("module": "es2015",, "target": "es5")
  • tsconfig.json in day-path ("module": "ES2015",, "target": "ES2015",)

sketching out a development schedule (revision 20)

The schedule of the month:

  • complete project associated with new version of SonghaySystem.com 📜🚜🔨
  • generate Publication indices from LiteDB for Songhay.Publications.KinteSpace
  • use the learnings of previous work in Bolero to upgrade and re-release the kinté space 🚀
  • convert Day Path Blog and SonghaySystem.com to HTTPs by default 🔐

https://github.com/BryanWilhite/