2024 Q1

In the previous post, one of our goals for 2024 was to have consistent progress throughout the quarters. I can confidently say that we have made some improvements to the @pawa ecosystem which consists of the @pawa bot, app website, and PawaLite.

Here’s the progress made in each area.

@pawa bot

This the reason why you’re here, the Discord bot for audio recording. Let’s keep it simple, here’s a list of highlights:

• Code changes for the Q1
  • Full changelog in the docs
• Display accurate duration in embed
• Remove Honeycomb instrumentation for generic OTEL
  • The goal with this is to get better metrics and fix bugs we cannot reproduce locally
• @pawa responds in the voice channel text channel if it cannot find an appropriate channel
  • This almost eliminates the need for having set a default channel.

Recordings Website: https://app.pawa.im

This is the webapp where you can see and download your recording, we created this to augment the experience with @pawa. The majority of the changes happened in the backend, but I’ll list some of the biggest changes.

• Add a ko-fi donate button
• The mobile view of the page, shows the links at the bottom
• Upgrade recording waveform UI library to the latest
• Upgrade UI component library to the latest, this gives us Dark Mode
  • Dark Mode is currently busted and need to make adjustments
• Use scittle.cljs to write in-line Clojurescript, this is a technical detail, but allows me to iterate faster!

PawaLite

This is the self-hosted, all batteries included, version of @pawa. Aside from the changes listed in the @pawa bot section, here’s the noteworthy upgrades:

• Add /recover slash command!
  • This also had a bug on the initial release, but it should be good now.
• Add /autorecord slash command!
  • Fast followed by fixing a bug where PawaLite wouldn’t follow the user between voice channels
• /autosave is on by default
• Automatic database upgrade script
  • In the past, we relied on the user, but now this happens automagically!

Q2 Goals

For the upcoming quarter, we’ve created a milestone in GitLab to track the tickets required to achieve these goals. I’ll be conservative with the work that we take on but here’s what we have in mind:

Upgrade to Java 21 LTS

While this isn’t a fun feature, staying up to date with the latest JDK will provide security and performance improvements. This will affect the Docker images and the JRE packaged with PawaLite, which will need special instructions on how to perform the upgrade.

Add ID3 metadata

A supporter requested that we include member names in the recording’s ID3 metadata. We’ve already been thinking on a feature along these lines, and this is a specific implementation of said feature. This should be doable in Q2.

Stretch Goal: Show members on webapp

Playing off of the previous request, we could start showing this list of members on the webapp as well. We might start with a simple list of names, but what I’d like to eventually show is the member’s avatar image and highlight the waveform when they were speaking.

Adding this as a stretch goal as it will require changes to the database schemas and therefore a migration and therefore longer downtime.