Waddle Devlog 3

Releases! Releases!

You can download releases on the github page now!

What changed?

• Added a README
• Added a timeout option for penguins (my name for workflow tasks)
• Added SendFolderPenguin and ReceiveFolderPenguin which can send and receive folders from the server
• Added Logging
• Added SendFilePenguin and ReceiveFilePenguin which can send and receive files
• Improved the CLI
• Got really stressed out trying to become #1 on the globaly hackatime leaderboard 😅
• Managed to become #1 on the global Hackatime leaderboard in last 24 hours
• Added publish waddle workflow so I can build the binaries using waddle

What’s planned?

• Completely refactor the workflow runner so that nested workflows can be allowed
• SendCompressedFolderPenguin
• ReceiveCompressedFolderPenguin

Bugs are genuinely taking the life out of me

Genuinely the worst thing ever. I STILL can’t figure it out but I had to post my weekly devlog anyways. Can you believe we’re 28 weeks into 2026??!

Here’s the chaos where I accidentally created a “Pocket Empire” (Day 1105)

Watch the video (click the title) if you wanna see how I ended up here and a minor crash out. very minor.

OVERVIEW:

Most of this time was spent adding detailed documentation. I added a table or api endpoints, detailed info on how to run locally, info on security and the tech stack, and put a lot of work in it. My readme is 300 lines long and I am very proud of it. I also made a file tree with info about it which is pretty cool. Also fixed all bugs I could find.

NEXT STEPS:

• Ship!

CHALLENGES:

Readmes are hard to write. Making tables are really annoying and take forever.

OVERVIEW:

This is a major update with a lot of time working that wasn’t tracked. I have made a projects page for each project, involving editing the project, and viewing more details. Ive updated the UI a bit. Ive added a privacy policy and a TOS. And I redid the organization of the project to include pages (e.g openatlas.jackjacobson2011.com/privacy). I am preparing to launch the project soon, and have applied for the extension in the firefox add on store. I also have double checked security and have published the project on my website, where the frontend and backend now live.

NEXT STEPS:

• Write readme
• Get on other extension stores

CHALLENGES:

• Learning what legally has to be in a TOS and privacy policy
• Learning about CORS and its best practices
• Dealing with firefox

NOTE ABOUT INACTIVITY:
I have had some stuff in my life that has kept me from working on this project. It has been 23 days, but this will get back on track. I cant wait to finish this and release it for everyone!

OVERVIEW:

Added a working inspector, a lot of bug fixes, and functioning projects.

NEXT STEPS:

• AI
• Project pages
• Improved UI

CHALLENGES:

• A lot of bugs
• I have limited cybersecurity knowledge so I had to do a lot of research to ensure my site is secure

OVERVIEW:

Sorry for another short devlog. Polished, fixed bugs, adding commands, adding saving. I have decided that I am going to do my second ship! I do plan on working more on this in the future prolly maybe.

NEXT STEPS:

• Ship!

CHALLENGES:

• More localstorage stuff and working with file ids for the file manager was fun and interesting to learn about
• More writing for the readme

OVERVIEW:

Added a file explorer! Sorry for the three days wait, but this is a bigger app than normal. it allows you to create file structures and files. Currently the only file you can open are .txt files, however. These .txt files open in the notepad. Find the secret file and decode it for a surprise!

NEXT STEPS:

• Add editing .txt files and saving them with file explorer
• prepare to ship
• Terminal commands update

CHALLENGES:

• The biggest reason it took this long to make the app was that I had to redo the entire code for opening folders and files. I had it set so every click it would re-render the explorer (makes sense in my head). The rendering resets the DOM and makes the original element you click on a new identical element. However, to open a file you need to double click it. This wasn’t working, and it took my a bit of research to find out why. The way HTML decides if something is a double click is if you rapidly click the same element twice. Resetting the DOM meant the this element would change every click. So, I had to redo the system to only render when necessary, which required a significant overhaul of the javascript

NOTE:

I originally started this project on Forge but decided to do stardance instead. The below is two devlogs seperated with the first 2 hours and the second 1.5 hours.

DEVLOG 1 (first 2 hours):

OVERVIEW:

Hello! I am completely new to hardware design like this. Only thing ive done is a little bit of messing around with breadboards and a motor for a flavortown project. Anyways I have had a problem with my laptop withmy current laptop where it doesnt have media controls. So I have designed this board with kicad (I learned how to do it just today) and hope to get funding and make this in real life to solve a problem I have without paying large coorperations and while having fun!

NEXT STEPS:

• I have some existing Fusion360 skills so I am going to design I case for this! Should be fun
• Do research on getting the actual parts I need and how to integrate it into the board.

CHALLENGES:

• AS previously mentioned this is all pretty new to me. I had to learn a new software (even if its basic).
• Cant wait to learn more about KiCad and other parts of this project.

DEVLOG 2 (Second 1.5 hours):

OVERVIEW:

Created the firmware framework for the board! I also created a BOM but that time wasnt recorded. Readme was also made with info on the project and images and build instructions.

NEXT STEPS:

• Cad

CHALLENGES:

• I spent around an hour trying to get the code to compile in VSC with platformio. I kept getting wierd errors and I tried to trouble shoot for a while but couldnt get it to work. I moved to Aurdino IDE which solved the problem
• I havent ever written code like this before o it was really interesting to learn how to do it.

OVERVIEW:

Added about app! Has slideshow which can be easily adjusted to tell you about features of the os, this is to help reviewers understand how the site works. Also noticed an issue where it doesnt look great because asstes werent loading, hence the boot screen! It has a progress bar which says what its lodaing! Backed to being locked in the btw.

NEXT STEPS:

• More apps
• Readme update
• More commands for terminal (things that actually do things)

CHALLENGES:

• Dynamically reading DOM to get all images that need to be loaded
• Styling the about app to make it helpful but also reasonable to make
• Git being weird (ended up making a few custom commands to interact with the remote)

OVERVIEW:

Hi! Sorry for the long wait between dev logs (again). Ive had to just deal with some things recently and havent had time for this. Added a start menu that allows you to search apps or search the web This is a smaller feature, but dont worry, much more is to come.

NEXT STEPS:

• Intro app to say features
• Other apps

CHALLENGES:

• Interacting with other parts of my code in this part of the code hsa been fun to prove to myself how upgraded my organization is
• Also enjoyed using more of css modification within JS as opposed to just writing more css which I am very tired of

OVERVIEW:

Added a changable background, added movable desktop icons. Sorry for taking a break in development for a few days, I haven’t been locked in. Happy Fourth of July to those who celebrate.

NEXT STEPS:

• Additional app
• Start menu
• Into that tells you what you can do

CHALLENGES:

• I was having issues getting to the browser icons to move on the site, it was working locally but wasnt working and gave no errors when pushed to the site. Still coulden’t tell you how I got it working.
• Had to store the bcakground in a local storage on the computer, i havent messed arounf with that before and I found it very fun.

OVERVIEW:

Sorry for there not being a devlog in while, I took a break on this project to work on some other things (jame gam + other Stardance projects). However, I have read and greatly appreciate my feedback from my previous ship and added the most common suggestion, a browser! A simple browser with multiple tabs, access to the general web, and all in the same window system that already exists!

NEXT STEPS:

• Movable window icons
• Bookmark system
• Another game?

CHALLENGES:

• It turns out, most major websites do not support being embedded in other sites. For example, google. I spent a while trying to get around this with proxies, different apis, and different methods, however found all to be insufficient. Eventually I found workaround involving modifying the urls of the site, which I have hardcoded into the script.
• Learning how to use iframes was fun and interesting, although the parameters of them I found quite confusing.

OVERVIEW:

Once again, I am very sorry for the long time between devlogs. This came with a suprising amount of bugs that took a suprising amount of time to fix. But, now the other two pages of OpenAtlas work! You can log out and delete your account, save to projects, sort by projects, and have everything secure and deletable at the click of a button.

NEXT STEPS:

• Make projects page more detailed
• Make project AI-detectable (waiting on more nest resources for that)
• General UI improvments
• Add functionality to inspector

CHALLENGES:

• The majority of problems came from SQL. Had to redo a lot of server and database code because it was having so many issues pulling and pushing to the database with my api.
• Organization is also starting to prove to be a massive problem as this project grows with 40+ files, its hard to keep track of what is where and imports and such

OVERVIEW:

I have regained motivation, ig the backend just kinda bored me with all the problems and such. But also, made the extension actually good! The styling matches the website now, and you can now login to the extension. I also added so the resources are saved with your user in mind, so you can later recall only your resources, which is vital functionality.

NEXT STEPS:

• Add more UI pages
• Add categorizing

CHALLENGES:

• Using my API and modifying it to have the correct data has been really fun and interesting.
• Even further learning about SQL has also been fun.

OVERVIEW:
First of all, I apologize for the massive amount of time without a
devlog. Recently I have felt a bit burnt out with this project and have
been spending a lot of time with only a little bit to show for it.
However, that being said, a true signup and sign in system has now been
implemented! You can sign up with an account, the password is encrypted
so I can’t see it, and it is securely stored in a database where you can
now log in with those credentials at any time. I have the framework for
preferences set up and more. Also, this stardance platform has had
massive improvements these last week or two, so thanks everyone at
HackClub for your great work!
‎
NEXT STEPS:

• storing user-specific entries, and connecting the extension to
  specific accounts
• Further UI pages
• Setting to delete your data from the database
  ‎
  CHALLENGES:
• The majority of the reason for this taking so long has been learning
  how to securely do the system, the last thing i want is to release a
  project where I can see your password, or where the password itself is
  stored in a vulnerable way, or where personal info is stored. Learning
  the right way to do this has been amazing
• This has also required me to expand my sql skills, and learning how to
  interact with databases better than I have been

I think we now support multiple attachments!? (well, we always did.. it’s just complicated)

and holy I need to work on this composer

OVERVIEW:
Began work on front end! Nothing is functional atm, and it doesn’t look great, but the framework is there. All of the projects and middle stuff are placeholders. It does look workable though. And also I actually figured out newlines?!?!?!?!?! Thanks random guy on slack
‎
NEXT STEPS:

• Improve looks
• Other pages
• Improve extension design
  ‎
  CHALLENGES:
  ‎- Variables in css, they should be helpful for later editing of design, and was very interesting to learn.
  ‎ ‎
  For this devlog I decided to also highlight some challenges that have been persistent throughout the projects, those are below.
  ‎
• Error messages. In an effort to improve the opensource-ness of my project, I have been working to include fallbacks and useful error messages. It is not only helpful for my own debugging, but for everyone else trying to use or replicate my project!
• Proper naming conventions for variables and functions are also part of this effort for me, in the past I just make everything camel case, but recently have been trying to do better with this.

OVERVIEW:
Linked server to a database! I am using sqlite to store all data, which was really fun to learn. Whenever the server receives a packet, it pushes it to the database, which updates in real time. Also set up framework to have get requests from the database, so data can be read. Also turns out I lied about being able to use devlogs correctly, my method for newlines in these devlogs just stopped working, its great.
NEXT STEPS:

• Begin webui, I decided to use react after some research because it appears to be much more useful of a skill than just vanilla html, css, and js, which is what I used for webos.
• Improve extension design
  CHALLENGES:
• I learned a lot about databases which was really interesting, however I found it difficult to figure out how bits worked in the database as well as learning how sql requests work
• It was also difficult to be able to see the database, it isnt a necessity for the project but is really nice so you can actually see the state of the project data