Controlling the beast

#software #admin #sanga #bestpractice

We have all seen these happen too many times:

Every big project starts as a small one.
and a small project does not need a lot of stuff, right?

It doesn't need TESTING 🙈
It doesn't need SECURITY 🙉
It doesn't need CI/CD 🙊

Well, if you plan for this project to stay grounded and never make the leap to become a production product then you are probably right 🐒

This Byte is about another item that is usually left out until the project is too big and desperately needs it - CONTROLLING

Controlling

Every system needs a way to control its production product, for instance:

User's data
Content served by your app
Feature flags
Many more...

The greedy way

"For now, let's just create admin APIs"

Well, you do have a way to control but in the cost of:

Constant manual dev effort (the worst kind of dev effort 😉)
Inconsistent way of use, the risk of breaking something up is always high
Obscurity of implementation, APIs that are not consumed by any client can break/change without anyone knowing.
Centralized knowledge of how to control your system

The better way

Some call it "Admin Panel", others "Back office", I've heard "Dashboard" and "Console".

In Sanga we call it Control™

An easy-to-use app that provides a safe and consistent way of using those notorious "Admin APIs".

Controlling the beast at Sanga

As soon as we felt that those admin APIs are being used more than "just a couple of times" we've built our Control™ using Vue.js.

As straightforward as it may sound, our "definition of done" for a feature includes the ability to manage the feature through Control™.

That means that for every feature we:

Think what are the possible ways to control this feature
Design the relevant admin APIs
Enhance Control™ with the ability to interact with these APIs

Fun fact

Once you have such a capability, new features are being designed with control in place. That leads to some super cool capabilities that otherwise would probably be developed as stiff client-side logic that would be re-written endlessly.