Welcome to 2024! Here's an update to what I did in the last part of 2023.
If it wasn't clear by my previous gist, I'm not the biggest fan of Bootstrap as it is currently, and I wanted to leave it in 2023. The removal of Bootstrap from Mercury at the beginning of 2024 serves as the clean slate to build the highly anticipated frontend rewrite upon. Navigation and readability need to be improved across the site, and enhancing the ways members can communicate with each other on site is important as well.
At the beginning of the year, Mercury barely even had a proper backend, and now it's flourishing into a near full-fledged revival with industry-leading features and web design. I've been focussing heavily on code quality and maintainability, as we want to open-source Mercury once it's complete.
Mercury has also finally acquired a VPS to run RCCService on (also allowing dedicated gameservers in the future!), and renders will be re-enabled on site soon.
I'm also working on a few programs for various classes and qualifications, especially my AH Computing Science project.
2023 was a big year. Totalling 2773 commits by me (mostly on Mercury), I learned so much more about backend development and levelled up my frontend techniques a lot. For the next year I hope to learn more paradigms I've been exploring like functional programming, and I'm interested in how these can be applied to things I'm working on.