I was pair programming with a friend of mine (who is getting more in depth into programming) on a small project and the subject of tests (as in Unit Tests) came up to try and debug some behaviour. My friend then communicated that they have not written many tests and was a bit unsure of how to get started. To which I very much appreciated their honesty (it’s often not easy).

I know this sounds crazy right? Lets rewind a bit so we can try and understand why.

In a previous post Material 3 + Flutter 3.16.0 Broke Pi Garage Theme I stated that you should pin core dependencies. Apart from the Flutter version there was another place that I did not pin dependencies specifically enough. This was in the Dockerfile. Here I has specified the node version as below.

FROM node:18

As you can see although this would limit the Node version to 18 this would allow anything from 18.0.0 through to 18.100.0. Something very interesting happened with version 18.19.0. In the Release Notes one of the first things mentioned is that npm 10 has been backported and included. This like the Flutter + Material 3 issue linked above caught me by surprise.

What happened?

The release of Flutter 3.16.0 introduced something that caught me out and broke the theme in the Pi Garage companion mobile app.

lthough Material 3 has been “opt in” for quite a while (I couldn’t find since when) it is only in 3.16.0 breaking changes you can see that this version has flipped the default value for the flag (useMaterial3) from false to true.

In the Pi Garage mobile app I did not set this flag to false when it was introduced as well as I didn’t lock the version of Flutter in the GitHub action that built and deployed the Android and iOS apps.

It’s been a while since Pi Garage V2 has been released and I have not mentioned it on my socials. Since this is a major release I thought I would go into a bit of detail on to why I decided to make a major release version bump as well as the nitty gritty to what changed.

V1 Problems

Although V1 worked it had a pretty big flaw in my opinion and it was related to how it handled the sequences. To rewind, in Pi Garage a sequence is the actual hardware “actions” that take place when a door is “opened”, “closed” or “toggled”.

Whilst performing the server migration (detailed in some of my previous posts) I had to perform a database migration of a Postgres instance.

5 Million Data Points

This database though not critical is a basic Data Warehouse that is the data storage for a data scraper application. This means that although some down time is acceptable a large window of downtime of the database would result in a large data gap.