We’ve seen some amazing progress on OpenFarm – as a community, as an organization, and as a software product. We’ve been iterating over the software that powers the website and releasing updates weekly – almost bi-weekly – for the past few months, which saw a sort of culmination with our launch last week. A couple of short hours after the launch e-mail, the bugs and feature requests started trickling in. We’ve already updated the site a couple of times since the 18th, most recently half an hour ago.

Since the last time we posted a development update (November 29th), here’s what’s new on the site:

• Added several help pages.
• Completely overhauled how guide and crop results look.
• Moved our code hub to https://github.com/openfarmcc/OpenFarm/.
• Improved image uploading for crops, guides, and guide stages.
• Completely rebuilt the guide creation flow.
• Added gardens and garden management.
• Adopted a CLA (contributor’s license agreement).
• Did some number crunching to come up with compatibility scores.

Continue reading OpenFarm Dev Update #2 →

OpenFarm’s sofware is being written very rapidly by a dedicated team of software developers from around the world. The process of collaboration is quite interesting for those who are unfamiliar with modern software development. Here is the gist of how it works:

Our software is stored in a ‘repository’ with a service called GitHub; a repository is just a technical name for a folder – a place where you store files. Using GitHub is free for us because our software is open-source; you can see OpenFarm’s repository here. The repository holds the ‘master’ version of the software, as well as all of its history. When someone wants to change the software, add a feature, or fix a bug, they ‘fork’ the software into their personal GitHub account, which means they make a copy of it. The software developer then makes their changes on their own version and then ‘commits’ those changes – in other words, the save the changes. Then they send in a ‘Pull Request’ to the master version. Someone looks over the changes, and if they are good, the changes are ‘pulled’ into the master version. In other words, the modified version is merged with the master, which allows others to then build off of the more updated master version, and so the process repeats. Continue reading 1,000 Commits →

It’s what everyone’s been waiting for – an update from the OpenFarm development team.

It’s been an incredibly busy month in stats. There have been about 50,000 bits of code added to the database (and 25,000 bits deleted, which is about as important really) since the start of August. The OpenFarm codebase has 18 contributors – which we’re absolutely thrilled with – not considering the amazing people doing so much work outside of the code (which is a lot harder to measure, but this is a dev update, so we’ll stick to that).

Numbers aside, here’s an overview of OpenFarm as a program:

OpenFarm runs on Ruby on Rails enhanced with a largely AngularJS front-end (this is still a matter of debate). We have a MongoDB database, which guarantees maximum flexibility in these early growth stages, and fast search and upgrading into the future. Search of our database is powered by ElectricSearch. Our code is stored on GitHub. If you’re interested in such things, OpenFarm has a testing framework that reports to Coveralls – we try to keep our back-end test coverage at 100%. We’re still looking for a good way to test front-end code. Continue reading OpenFarm Developer Update and Overview →