GSoC 2025 – Week 9 with CircuitVerse ⚙️

Hey everyone!
Week 9 was focused on enhancing the search experience through improved sorting mechanics and a clean, modular UI implementation.

🔢 Sorting PR: Backend & Frontend Integration

We opened a comprehensive PR that added:

✅ Counter cache columns for:
- stars_count on projects
- projects_count on users

This allows us to sort results efficiently using precomputed values instead of expensive COUNT(*) queries, which improves performance and scalability.

On the frontend side, we:

✅ Created a sorting UI component that dynamically adjusts options based on whether the user is browsing projects or users
✅ Hooked into the query parameters from the URL to initialize the UI with the correct state
✅ Made the select dropdown the secondary source of truth.

📦 Stimulus Controller for Sorting UI

We used a Stimulus controller to manage this sorting UI, ensuring modular, clean code and proper separation of concerns. This allowed us to:

Isolate behavior for easier testing and maintenance
Update the UI reactively based on changes in state or URL
Keep logic scoped tightly to the component that needs it

This PR took more time than usual as we spent time learning and applying Stimulus to build production-grade modular code.

📌 What's Next (Week 10 Plan)

✅ Finalize and merge the Sorting PR after one last review
🚧 Raise the PR for Search Filters UI, which will allow users to filter projects by tags and users by roles/interests
⌛ Complete the Footer section for the Landing Page Revamp once design discussions are finalized

Week 9 was slower in terms of visible output, but a lot of foundational work has been laid for a smoother Phase 2 rollout.