I have developed 6 Power-Ups now for Trello. When I first started developing for Trello it was HARD to keep track of and use the Power-Up API. I would ask myself questions like:
“t.alert(), is the JSON it takes {message:’…’} or {text:’…’} and was the delay set with ‘duration’ or ‘time’…?”
I kept having to jump back and forth from the online documentation and my code. It took forever. My code was full of errors. I usually did not know I got something wrong until I saw red in the F12 Developer Tools in Edge. It felt so… 1995 all over again.
I might be dating myself a bit here, but when I started development, I learned BASIC on a TI-99/4a. In those days, outside plain old “compile errors” (which, it took a while to compile too), you usually learned about errors when you got a syntax error at runtime. In my first job, job as a developer, I wrote COBOL and you learned about an error in your code when the job failed its run at 2am in the morning and was pulled off the mainframe.
In today’s modern programming landscape, you get intellisense helping you identify the properties of objects and what comes next. You have ChatGPT helping you write out the super complex sorting algorithms. Algorithms, by the way, that you went to college to learn. You know algorithms, those ugly mind warping beasts where professors cackled like Smith in the Matrix as they assigned them. Algorithms that caused you to break and sharpen thousands of #2 pencils. Algorithms that wasted brain-cells. Oh, so many brain cells. And after it all you still only made a C in the class. I digress… So… Yep… we have come a LONG way.
So, given how far we have come it boggles my mind that some object models are not brought forward to work with modern development platforms.
So, as per my previous post on the subject, I hunkered down and built a Trello Type Definitions file.
As a Trello developer, the one thing I think helps to keep me sane is that I am able to use the HECK out of the Type Definitions file, which makes my life much easier.
But my Type Definitions file is not perfect, and I am constantly “fixing it” and adding to it.
Yesterday was one such day. I have taken the last 4 months of Trello development (lessons learned, etc.) and published a rather significant update.
I just published v1.0.1.20231021. If you are using it and find it helpful, please let me know.