light/docs/guidelines/development.rst

.. guidelines/development

Development
===================================================================================================
As a solo-project, I am not only the **developer**, but also the **manager** of this project. Therefore
there is a need, if this project is to succeed, to have a development plan. 

Such a plan should:

- Define a way to **distribute work** (across time, since there's only 1 developer).
- Define what is a **unit of work** (cycles).
- Provide a way to **track productivity**, which helps projecting the future and **detecting patterns** early on.
- Provide a **pipeline** for the work to go through and **minimize ambiguity**.

These are the **management** aspects of the project, which help the development goals to be more **pragmatic**
---by pulling my mind out of its **engineering dreamland**, and make it focus on the **broader picture**.

Cycle
--------------------
A cycle is one **step** in development, one cycle = one ticket, and it consists of 4 stages:

1 - Make it known
    - Write the commit message.
        - This limits the **scope of changes** and gives you a very specific **goal** to work towards.
        - If something outside of this scope really bothers you, fix and stash for a future cycle.
        - Make a ticket if stash-fix is implausible ---**DO NOT** write **todo** comments.
        - The message should follow the project's **commit message specifications**.

    - Make a ticket.
        - Version control (git) is a **development-tool**, not a **management-tool**.
        - Provide a very brief description ---This may be used in the commit message's body.

2 - Make it work
    - Write high-level tests that confirms the cycle's requirements are met.
        - That is, specify requirements in a programming language instead of English.
        - You're done when all the tests pass.
        - Preferably write the tests first, but it's okay to start with the interface.
        - Tests may not be necessary depending on the requirements and commit type.

    - "Make it work" doesn't mean liberally producing shit code, you should:
        - Follow project's **conventions**.
        - Follow **best practices** and **proven swe principles**.
        - Enable **warnings as errors**.
        - Enable **static analysis**.
        - Don't break any pre-existing-tests.
        - Have the over-all picture in mind.

3 - Make it right
    - Test driven refactoring
        - Now you have a better picture of how things relate and work.
        - Switch to a TDD-style development to do the refactoring while following swe best-practices and proven-principles.

4 - Make it fast
    - This is an engine, at the end of the day, **performance** is king.
    - Get a performance and/or memory profile and try to alleviate the bottlenecks.


Sprint
--------------------
A sprint is the collection of all the finished cycles in one week.
It's meant to provide insight on development speed and help projecting the future.


Commit Message Specification
--------------------
The project follows the `Conventional Commits Specification <https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0-beta.4>`_.

With the following commit types:

- feat
    - For adding new features.
    - Coressponds to a **minor** semantic bump in version.

- refactor
    - For refactoring existing code.
    - Coressponds to a **patch** semantic bump in version.

- fix
    - For fixing an issue.
    - Coressponds to a **patch** semantic bump in version.

- build
    - For changes to the build pipeline.
    - Coressponds to a **patch** semantic bump in version.

- chore
    - For releases, .gitignore changes, deleting unused files, etc.
    - Does not affect the version.

- ci
    - For anything related to the ci/cd pipelines like .drone.yml changes.
    - Does not affect the version.

- asset
- test