KnowKit Blog
Entry from 26.05.2021
We are Armin& Alex. Welcome to KnowKit Dev-Log #7, where we will keep you up to date on the latest developments around KnowKit product development.
"Wat yarn-startest du denn da?" (What are you yarning up for?) -from Knowkit Tech-Weekly
Data Gardening
We wanted to go further with searching and ended up experimenting with search rankings. Ranking searches are not a trivial problem as we mainly want to rely on our context search which is based on video information. Our assumption is that context searching is the most useful when we stick very close to the actual information, rather then including to much meta information into it. But we also want to find not only content but the containers (kits) these recordings are maintained in.
This is why we are currently working on reranking techniques to see how we can scale up the relevants of search results up to a meta level that is comparable to other results in different recordings, with different contexts.
Start/Stop recordings, Rename and Delete
In the last DevLog we discussed the data model in the prototype and what we learned from it. Another problem was the status of the recording, whether it ended correctly or whether it is in an edge case. We have improved the status here.
The last missing part of the application has landed now in a first version in the new user interface: starting and stopping recordings.
It is now also possible to rename kits and also to delete and rename documents.
A great help for us was the amazing use-async react-hook created by Robert Pazurek and the associated StateSkeletons component.
This enabled us in the recorder component, which has many dependencies and executes many effect-hooks, to load all the necessary data first, to handle errors correctly and only then to render the component in order to prevent unnecessary re-rendering.
Speaking of re-rendering, a broad recommendation goes to Why-did-you-render aka wdyr. I haven't used the react-dev-tools for a long time, but wdyr is definitly a time-saver.
You can find the use-async hook from Robert Pazurek here: https://gitlab.com/formoe/formoe/-/tree/master/packages/use-async/src
Also take a look at the other very helpful react hooks from Robert, if you are involved in frontend development - and if you're not into front-end development, ask Robert how your fitness routine can improve your life - I can highly recommend him as an expert on both fields :)
The react tool wdyr can be found here: https://github.com/welldone-software/why-did-you-render
That's it - see you next week for KnowKit DevLog #8!