Struggles with scully

I spent a good few hours today bashing my head against a feature for this portfolio I just couldn't get working. The basic idea was to leverage scully's transferState service to "save" github API data I load, so I could integrate my github gist snippets into this app.

However, I ran into issues at every turn with minimal insight into what was going on.

1. Github's api is rate limited to 60 requests per hour. I would hit this and only get a small 403 error in my scully build. Furthermore, I couldn't get any further insight into the error beyond the code, so I can to manually add log statements in the library to get any idea that I was getting rate limited.

2. To workaround the rate limit, I got a personal access token and set it up for codespaces. This would of been ok, except I had a typo in my header, and ran into more vague errors.

3. After realizing my mistake, I started on the actual feature where I assumed I could use scully to get the raw data from the api, and then manage it within the app. Instead, I just got the id property and nothing else. I should look back into this part, as I might of overlooked a feature of scully. Regardless, because I just got the id, I thought I could use the transferState service to "save" the full data, if I make a direct call via http to the API, through it.

4. I updated my github api service to make the call, and only got undefined in return. After bashing my head against the service more, I realized the transferState was returning undefined because it was getting an error. By this point I stopped, as this is around the third time scully has directly hidden errors from me, which is a huge pain when the docs are missing so much.

Because of this, I might start looking for alternative static site generators for Angular (or just bite the bullet and not use Angular!). Its one thing to lack features, but to spend so much time fighting the framework itself is just too annoying.

With this post, I think I'll start spending some time on my other side projects that don't rely on scully. The first project will be the flash card app, which is connected to firebase, but doesn't have much UI.

The other project will be the chrome-neo app, which will be a new version of the chrome-neo chrome extension I made for college using angular.js. This new version will probably also rely on firebase, and provide more features than the current version.

Keep learning, keep building :+1: