August 19, 2020 An Update from the Product Development Team: Challenge V5 API Release
What has the product development team been hard at work on? V5 API! What does that mean for you? Read on to hear all the release notes and updates.
On August 19, 2020, Community App integrated with Challenge v5 API for Challenge Listings, Challenge Details, Registration and Terms. This release means the challenge listings and details now runs using the latest v5 Challenge API. It provides significant speed improvements to listings, search, navigation, and registration.
Right on the heels of the v1.0 release, there will be a v.1.1 and subsequent micro releases which will be a slight refactor of the front-end which will result in better performance of the Challenge Listings and Challenge Details pages and improvement to the search feature on Challenge Listing page, more intelligent tagging, and we will have the ability to show open Tasks on challenge listings page.
In V5, Challenges have the main tracks types (Development, Design, QA, Data Science) and three challenge types (Challenge, First to Finish, Task) so there can be any combination of track and challenge type.
You will notice a few new changes to the UI:
- The subtracks filter will be replaced with “Type” filter: Challenge, First to Finish, Task. This has been simplified to identify the three main types of work we have: Group competition, Fastest submission competition, and a sole-user assigned task.
- Because of the Subtrack->Type change, legacy subtracks such as Marathon Match, Wireframe, Bug Hunts, Front-end Design, Idea generation, Test Suites, Test Scenarios, Testing competition have been moved to the Keywords dropdown. Other legacy subtracks have been consolidated/removed.
- QA is now a separate track with a purple track color
- Currently, TCO points are associated with F2F regardless of track. With the new Challenge v.1.0 release, there will be the ability to distinguish F2F based on tracks (Development, Design, QA, Data Science). TCO points will be aggregated across the four types of F2F.
- In the current site, if you submit multiple times to a Code challenge, the submissions list would only show your most recent submission. For reasons that will become clearer in the future, we’re removing this consolidation to make code challenges more consistent with Design, QA, and Data Science challenges. This means that the submissions table will show multiple rows for the same member id. However, your code submission will still only be judged on your last upload.
Measurable Benefits of v1.0 Release (August 19, 2020)
- Page Load requires about 1/10th the API calls. Once the UI is refactored, page load times are around 80% faster that current production
- Searching and Filtering is aggregated on the API side* resulting in less initial load tim and less browser-side processing
- Registration on a Challenge now takes less than 1 second on average
- Registration Terms Acceptance is50% faster and the DocuSign implementation has been updated to use their latest API with Webhooks to be more secure
* Some filtering is still done client-side and will be fixed in v1.1 release
Near Term Benefits (by November 2020)
- Redesigned Challenge Details, including Markdown for Challenge Specs
- Private Description on Challenges – This section only shows up if you’re registered on a challenge. This will prevent the need to “go to the forums” for client information, files, links to repos, etc
- Search and Filtering now completely api side, so the load on the browser to enable filtering is much lighter benefiting slow connections and mobile
Thank you to our committed community members, picachui, luizrrodrigues, sr_jr, callmekatootie, jmgasper, gondzo, narakvar90, fireice and thomaskranitsas to name a few who helped get us to this first release. This initiative to get Community App over to v5 API is only the first (but very important) step to get our app on a better foundation as we continue to resolve bugs and build new features for our members.
Have questions or comments? Go here.
Oanh.Tran
