2018-12-31 - 2018 Year in Review

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From: Tim <ti***8@gmail.com>
Message Hash: 3d38ac4131229a53d680ca049323e6b5f87d0dab370599ea5711b76fe8d675fc
Message ID: <CAESLx0+7TEy_BD-jSXfqVYS-AZ4qDyfWbCvw6vcR7a7h2MKwdw@mail.gmail.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 2018-12-31 22:03:22 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 01 Jan 2019 13:03:22 +0800

Raw message 

Firstly, a big thank you to those who have donated this year, especially
those who have setup recurring donations! I have considered a number of
times to mothball the Grase hotspot as it didn't feel like it was
needed/wanted any more. This year, the support you guys have shown me has
me determined to continue pushing forward!

Also, a big shout out to everyone who's been helping on the mailing list,
responding to peoples issues and helping each other. This shows me that the
community of users are active, and contributing back to the community by
helping others.

Yes, this year gone we missed something I really wanted. Bringing support
for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Unfortunately it's been much more work than
anticipated, and I've had much less spare time than anticipated (our family
grew again with another baby in September!). I also had time taken up by
some much needed changes to the website and VPN infrastructure. I did
manage to get a whole bunch of that done during some holidays in the middle
of the year, but it also uncovered the need to rewrite the server side VPN
management code.

Something that has also become apparent with the Symfony branch, it won't
be a clean upgrade path. It will have to be a database backup, clean
install, and then restore database and run upgrades. When the time comes
for this, I'll post detailed instructions. If I do manage to make it an in
place upgrade, then bonus.

Anyway, again, thanks for all the support this year. Here is a list of what
has been achieved!

   - Migrated website to new hosting infrastructure
   - Migrated VPN server to new hosting infrastructure
   - Rewrote VPN management (server side) code to be PHP 7 and OO (
   https://gitlab.com/grase/grase-key-manager)
   - Fixed client side VPN for long hostnames, and ever changing VPN key
   when docker is installed
   - Moved Symfony branch onto Symfony 4
   - Sorted out Doctrine in Symfony so it doesn't lazy load all parts of
   entities causing > 10 queries per user loaded (making the user page load
   almost instantly vs taking > 30 seconds for large databases)
   - Many other changes in Symfony branch as old framework pages are
   migrated. Changes can be seen at
   https://github.com/GraseHotspot/grase-www-portal/compare/6b9c493b49255095d75ec41d2f8b3e6690d2c56d...symfony4
   - Setup recurring donation form
   - Display donors on website (https://grasehotspot.org/donations/)
   - Display current level of recurring donations on the donations page
   (and goals)
   - Increased use of Gitlab along side GitHub. (Why? Because I get CI/CD
   for free at Gitlab)

Regards

Tim

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