#Styleguides and Co

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

calm patio
#

🧵

sharp steeple
#

I'm still reeling from Raw HTML in JSON. I guess that's better than having it in assembly or something. lol

calm patio
#

Re: UI styling. None of the developers working or contributing to PF1 have a particularly UI/UX heavy background I think, which makes e.g. a UI styleguide as necessary as impossible to create. I've tried to standardise some of the design parts in the past, but it's very much an ongoing effort, and balancing Foundry-native styling with the system's needs is not always an easy task.

sharp steeple
#

yea, that's a heavy lift if you're 100% dev with no UX training.

#

Part of my questions was to see what existed already; if someone already WAS good at it, then the question becomes "how to supplement without futzing up their groove"

#

In my day job I'm a solution architect for content, knowledge, and records management systems.

#

I've played a lot of roles along the dev train, but I've never gotten fast enough at any particular programming where I would call myself one. 🙂

#

I came into the work from the hardware side, primarily, so I'm strong in backend scripting (powershell, python, regex) more than anything

calm patio
#

When it comes to common rules and guidelines regarding how things are coded, requirements are relatively lax. Code styles and quality varied throughout time, with the focus usually being something that works. And the system grew a lot over time, adding many functions and parts that do improve the implementation of the Pathfinder rule set, but in many places there's also quite a bit of technical debt. Things are getting refactored every now and then (e.g. the system's API was heavily adjusted with 0.82.0) however, and some of the areas I'm currently working on aim to restructure some of the areas that now have a particularly strong flavour of having grown rather naturally than in a designed fashion.

sharp steeple
calm patio
#

If you want to scream a bit more, feel free to take a look at the API documentation that is now extracted from the code ;D

sharp steeple
calm patio
#

That, too, is an area that is actively being worked on though. The whole automatic API documentation thing was only introduced with the very recent 0.82. Before that there were some API docs that were maintained… sometimes.

sharp steeple
#

lol So like all docs?

#

Out of everything I brought up, what aspect do you think would be the most helpful to you / PF1e devs as a whole?

calm patio
#

In-Foundry documentation and tours are WIP/planned already, so working on those – while welcome – would "only" be doing work that requires time (which means it's probably not done tomorrow, but it can probably be handled).

#

Regarding FAQs, I'll probably see about getting its info into the help browser when I cycle back to it.

#

The single most massive endeavour that is unlikely to be solved without someone actively pickling it up would be the UI/UX thing.

sharp steeple
#

Do you think someone filling in the UX aspect would be worth it as a thing that gets solved over documentation of the tours?

#

like, do you think the ROI value of the UX overall is greater?

calm patio
#

Short term, tours and docs will likely make the system easier to grok and use than any abstract UI/UX guide could.

sharp steeple
#

Yea, as an on-ramp, tours and putting the FAQ elements into that system some how seems like a better short-term return.

calm patio
#

Long term, any groundwork that is done would be a massive blessing insofar as that the current process of trying things and redoing stuff all the time acts as an evil time sink.

sharp steeple
#

get more bang for the buck in the short term; any UX would need to be a collaborative effort with probably a pretty long runway to turn around value.

calm patio
#

Absolutely. The system has quite a few functions built in, but feature discoverability is lacking. Which is something tours can improve significantly.

sharp steeple
#

Okay, let me stew in this concept a bit and see what I can come up with. I don't want to sign up for something I can't deliver, and like everyone I'm stacked with things as-is, but there's an overlap of what I'm finding I'm making for my own group that probably has portability to the overall community in these fronts.