[badges] Future of Badges

[Clement Verna]

Hi all,

Today a few of us had a productive meeting to discuss the future of
the Badges application.

As a summary we have agreed on the following :

1 - No outreachy intern for this winter, but starting to prepare a
plan for next summer round.

2 - A new Front end for the application based on a JavaScript
framework and independent from the back end will be written bases on
the user trials and mock-ups. (Current plan is to have the inter work
on this next summer)

3 - Backend is hard, different possibility depending on how developer
time we have. Following are different options that need to be
discussed before moving forward.

1 - Focus on the current pain point and fix them. Hope is to improve
the current application performance
2 - Modify the back end so that it serves only JSON, consumed by the
new Front end
3 - Use the current code base and move it to Django
4 - Restart from scratch
5 - Move away from the message bus driven actions to award badges to
make the application
more generic and attract other community than Fedora.

Feedbacks are welcome, also there is Virtual Hack-fest happening
September 13-15th where it would be good to start coordinating some of
the backend work.

Thanks all

Following are the minutes:

## Attendees

Clément
Michal
Marie
Sayan
pingou


## Notes

* Frontend will be rewritten
* Backend ? is this worth the rewrite ?
    * Pyramid as a framework does not have a strong community and adoption
    * Django is the industry standard for Python based web application
* Current application is very slow
    * Badges image are big
    * Needs to download a lot of data to load a page
    * If rewrite this need to be kept in mind
    * Python2 dependencies not maintained
* Rewrite could also be porting current app to Django and slim down
the number of pages/feature
    * maybe 1 user page and 1 admin page.

* Start with the frontend --using a JS framework and let the backend
with pyramid but just serve JSON instead of templates.

* Refactoring Backend is difficult --> need experienced developer
there and a specification
    * Focusing in on the pain point first will give improvement performance

* Moving off the message driven backend would be good in order to make
the application more generic and not only Fedora centric.
    * Potential to get more contributors from other communities.

* Virtual Hackfest - September 13-15th
    * Idea to sit down and look at the technical pain point. Slow
Requests, Exception in the consumer etc
    * Write these down and come up with a plan to improve these.