Working on a new version of GINAbot web portal

I got approached by @thecryptodrive not so long ago to and accepted to join @buildteam, the company behind @minnowbooster. I also learned that GINABot is now part of BuildTeam and that's the first project I will be working on.

The team wanted to rebuild Gina's current web portal to provide a refreshed look and more powerful features. The project was already started but was left in an incomplete state and I needed to finish building the forms to record users' preferences into GINA's backend. It was a bit of a challenge for me as I'm still new with React and all related libraries. As I worked with the forms, I found that I was spending more time tweaking the CSS to make it looks good than working on the actual code and too many things were bugging me in the look and feel of the portal.

So I decided to ask for a total refactor of the code as it was still very young anyway and starting from scratch would probably faster than trying to understand how the existing code is behaving. I proposed to rewrite the whole thing using Material-UI an implementation of Material Design for React.

The proposal has been accepted by both @thecryptodrive and @reggaemuffin and pretty quickly I came up with a temporary look and feel while waiting for designers to come up with a final look and feel. The advantage of using Material UI is that it is coming with some default web components that already look good out of the box.

The design and text are still temporary as we are still at the very beginning. My plan is to build all the forms and related pages and then submit the bunch for review and testing. From there I will work on any feedbacks given by the team. But it's already looking good with minimum effort and I can now focus more on the features while still having something good to look at while building things.

Two new concepts are being introduced with the new web portal:

1. Receivers, they are basically services where your GINAbot notifications will be sent to. Currently they are email and Discord.
2. Rules, those are users' preferences in regards to notifications. They define what should trigger sending of a notification to a receiver. For example: send a notification when a certain user has received an upvote of at least 50% vote weight.

There will be much more to the new GINAbot but that is for a future post. There are still a lot to be developed for the receivers and rules.

It's exciting to see that GINAbot is getting a facelift and it's a pleasure and honour to be able to work on her code.

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Previously on my blog:

• Witness Earnings Weekly Report - 2019-09-23
• Updated Witness Post
• Retired and outdated Witnesses

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Credits

• The image at the top has been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.

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