5.4 build 1516 - Year-in-review
Hello! So, today marks 5 years since Plan development started. That’s a pretty long time to be honest. As has become customary, there’s a survey and a year-in-review post below this updates change log. Thanks for being awesome!
Special thanks to zax71, KairyByte & OLEGSHA for contributions to this update!
Change log
- Updated HighCharts to newer version since they have fixed performance issue, in addition I removed ordinal: false workaround in Plan that was used to avoid the performance issue. If you liked the odd gaps in your data that may have been present due to the workaround, you can set Display_options.Graphs.Show_gaps_in_data to true in the Plan config to have them visible.
- Fixed NPE related to null gamemode on some platforms
- Kairubyte added version number to javascript file loading addresses so that they are no longer cached by cloudflare between updates. (Which caused issues in the past)
- zax71 and OLEGSHA added some missing plugin dependencies to softdepend in plugin.yml
Survey
Here’s a link to this year’s survey: https://forms.gle/cpc6trn6wfJCpg8E9
Read on below for a look back on what has been going on with Plan this year & what’s in store in the future.
Year-in-review: Year 5
This year I started working as a full-time developer so the updates have been less frequent. Non-the-less, surprising to me, the development speed has not really slowed that much. Thanks to the past years of structuring the code, it is still easy to maintain and add new features to Plan.
Here are the “main” features that landed in the last year.
- The Query page
- Player join address gathering
- 15+ new Extensions
- Fabric support
- Network performance tab
- Server uptime
- Database driver downloading
In terms of features I’d say this year has been very good compared to previous years. I can’t claim all the credit, since a lot of this has been made possible by the numerous contributors! I decided to list all the contributors from 2021 (in order of appearance) here, thank you to: Guinness_Akihiko, galexrt, QuakyCZ, MrFriggo, vacoup, Kopo, Creeperface01, WolverStones, hallo1142, Aurelien30000, BruilsiozPro, WolverStones, BrainStone, AppleMacOS, 4drian3d, EyuphanMandiraci, 10935336, 洛伊, Sander0542, portlek, rymiel, mbax, untuned, PerchunPak, Shadowhackercz, HexedHero, Vankka, DrexHD, zisunny104, SkipM4, MAXOUXAX, adhg6 and BratishkaErik, zax71, KairyByte and OLEGSHA.
This year in numbers
- From build 1062 to 1515: 457 commits released as updates
- From #8 to #11 in top spigot plugins by rating: The reduced update frequency has likely impacted relative score compared to other plugins
- From 2500 servers to over 4000 servers
- From 49k lines to 59k lines of code (not counting extensions or web files)
- From 43,7% test coverage to 51.3% coverage
Last year around this time I thought there was a storm brewing in terms of maintainability, but this year has been rather smooth sailing - probably thanks to the reduced update frequency allowing longer testing times for dev builds catching more bugs before they end up in a main release.
Even though a bunch of tickets get closed all the time (260 tickets closed this year), they never run out. Luckily the new project tracker has turned out to be successful in reducing the ticket mass to manageable chunks that can be worked on whenever I have the extra energy to do so.
To turn towards the future, and adding a slight personal note, I have found a functional balance where things progress, but in bit smaller chunks than before. That said, I don’t have nearly as much time for Plan as I used to before I got a job (25h/week vs ~3h/week now), so larger features take quite a long time. In an ideal world I would love to work on Plan full-time, but since Plan covers 1.5% of my monthly living expenses, it is simply not feasible. Right now I’m also writing a Master’s thesis, so Plan development will likely stay on the a backseat at least until I have finished that endeavor. Don’t worry though - as you can see from the releases this year, being on the backseat has not really slowed things down :)
Thanks for reading, and for using Plan! I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and Happy new year!