This is a dev diary of implementing Filerion, a web-based file manager for online storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, s3 and more).
Analytics
I think it’s important to know how users your app. Which functionality they use and which functionality they don’t use.
I’m not a fan of just throwing kitchen sink analytics tool (like Google Analytics) at the problem.
They provide too much data I don’t care about and the data I care about is not presented in the best way.
I’m building a very simple analytics pipeline. The technical details are:
I use my own Go libraries siser and filerotate to save structured events in a daily file
daily files are gzipped and uploaded to s3-compatible online storage
I use Go to do stats, in memory, from those gzipped files
show stats in HTML
Lesson: programming has a compounding effect to it. I saved at least a couple of days because I wrote siser and filerotate libraries in the past. The more you do today, the more you can benefit in the future.
Context menu
Refactored context menu to be simpler and allow customizing shown menu items.
Customization allows me to make menu item text be more specific about the action.
For example, instead of generic View File I can show View 'foo.txt
Instead of Delete I can show Delete 3 files, 4 directories
Lesson: I believe small UI touches like that matter.
