Tightbeam - Week 1

What a week. The weather was super nice up here in Sweden during the last few days, so I've been off and on sketching architecture and writing code. But there is some result at the end of this first #tightbeam week.

I started out writing a simple react-native front-end for Android and IOS that deals with showing data to a user. The Home-screen is starting to get some kind of design slowly.

With that done I needed some place to grab data from, I created a small module that can be loaded with ssb-server on a local machine to fetch posts through ssb-client, built a quick end-point for it and hooked it into the react native app (over the local network). While working on this I noticed some really awesome things in ssb-server that will on the long run allow me to dynamically create new "users", each with their own gossip database and credentials. So the Hub I mentioned in my design post can actually hub multiple users soon™!

With the backend serving content, It was time to actually use the new live content on the app-side, turned out to be a 20 minute job! pull to refresh works as well, which is super nice!

I experimented with signing posts and keeping private keys, etc. on the phone side, but it's hard.
All messages stored in the database on the server side need to be signed. I tried to get around that by receiving the new gossip on my phone, loading the previous message from the backend then creating a hash to store the gossip after which the new gossip message was pushed to the server, but data had to go over the wire 3 times, which was really bad on phones with data-plans. For now I'll go with keeping the private keys server-side, if I end up meeting some long-time ssb devs online or irl with funky ideas, that might change. For now I take the path I see in front of me.

That said, on my short-term todo-list:

• Cut articles off on the start page, I don't need the entire post in there.
• Parse markdown client-side.
• Add "likes" and create a new end-point to load "comments".
• Add queries and end-points to the backend to bulk-load the latest profile pictures of different users.
• setup an offline cache that can keep around a few megs of messages and blobs (allowing offline access).