It's been a long time since any updates, but I wanted to announce that big things have already happened, and share what's coming next!
First off, everything is getting rebuilt from the ground up. The App and all the supporting websites, like the one you're reading this on (sneklog.com), the SnekLog User Guide (help.sneklog.com), and LongTailReptiles, where my personal blog posts and some care sheets live. They've all been migrated from Grav CMS to either 11ty or MkDocs. This is part of an automation piece I've been meaning to build for a long time that lets me host the websites without a traditional web server.
Next up, everything is moving off the current cloud provider, Linode, and onto AWS, deployed and managed with "Infrastructure as Code". This means that the entire setup lives in version-controlled config instead of manual clicking around. This lines up with my day job as a DevOps Engineer, and it means I'll be able to make updates much more easily instead of letting things sit for long stretches like I have with SnekLog.
Finally, the app itself is also getting a complete rework from the ground up. The current version of SnekLog runs on something called Flask, a fantastic Python library, but one with some limitations I want to get around. First, I'm "splitting" the front and back ends of the application into the part you see (the interface) from the part that handles data and logic behind the scenes. The backend is migrating to a library called FastAPI, and the front end is being completely rebuilt from scratch using React Native.
The most exciting part: not only will the web app get a facelift and the features you've been asking for (and that I've been dying to add), but building it this way also means I'll be using one codebase that can be converted fairly easily into iOS and Android apps. My goal is that a few months after the new web app goes live, I'll be able to publish to your phone's app store too.
I'll hopefully have more updates soon and I'll make sure to post some teasers or demos as things unfold. The App rebuild is still in it's early phases and while I have a lot of the back end code done. The front end is going to take a while since React is new to me.
I cannot wait to share more with you all. And as always, thanks for using SnekLog! TJ