December 2022 update
2022 has ended, and I hope you all had plenty of clear skies. For many of you has been a very rough year, and I would like to start this by sending a big hugs to our friends in 🇺🇦Ukraine♥️.
2022
This year has been very busy in terms of improvements to AstroBin, and the new equipment database was the largest code change ever deployed in AstroBin's 11 years online. Read more.
Besides that, AstroBin saw several improvements. Let me name the most impactful in cronological order:
The revision and gallery "quick browser"
Improvements to search by catalog objects
Lots of new search filters related to the new equipment database
Image collaborations
You can read more in the blog.
And, as usual, lots of minor bugs were fixed (thank you all who took time to report them!), translations were updated and improved (we now have Ukrainian and Hungarian too), the infrastructure was maintained and optimized, and the system was continuously updated with security patches and dependency upgrades.
AstroBin has hundreds of direct dependencies (software libraries that AstroBin uses so it doesn't have to reinvent the wheel) and keeping then up-to-date is crucial for several reasons:
Security: often updates include security related fixes.
Modernization: web technologies keep evolving at a fast pace, and AstroBin needs to be on top of that in order to still be relevant many years from now.
Stagnation prevention: very often, upgrading a dependency for security reasons, or because AstroBin needs a bug fix or a new feature in a new version, will cause a cascading effect and the need to upgrade lots of other dependencies. The longer this is postponed, the more difficult this ends up being.
The biggest update in December was the upgrade to the Angular 15 application framework. The user-visible effects of this are increased performance and better support for larger screens on everything running at app.astrobin.com. This also drops support Internet Explorer (pre Edge).