This is a dev diary of implementing Filerion, a web-based file manager for online storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, s3 and more).
Today:
fixes for uploading files to local filesystem and deleting directories
dev lesson: refactoring code can break things and that’s what happened here. I refactored how I store info about files in all filesystems. That made previously working code not work. It’s the price we pay for long term improvements
sort accounts by name. A small thing. If it was hard to implement, I wouldn’t bother, but it was easy so I did it.
I don’t think it’s obvious that you can upload files by drag & drop from desktop so I’ve added a notification about it:
lesson: it’s about empathy for the user. I know how the application works because I wrote it. I need to make an extra effort to put myself in the shoes of a user, who is new to the app. I don’t have the ability to do extensive user studies so I have to do my best to just anticipate potential issues
added support for has_more when listing files from Dropbox
lesson: once again, the lesson is that software development is iterative process. First implementation of listing files from Dropbox didn’t support the case where the directory has so many files that Dropbox splits response into multiple requests. I didn’t implement it then because I didn’t have a test directory with enough files to trigger this case. Now I’ve created the test directory and had a way to test it and write the code to support it
added Upload Files From Computer menu item. It’s more discoverable than drag & drop but doesn’t support uploading directories
