Proposal: Refactoring Spotbit and setting up CI pipelines

[HarshCasper]

Refactoring Spotbit

Spotbit is a Flask application designed to show-case Bitcoin price data and candles. My first milestone would revolve around publishing a documentation site for Spotbit to allow developers and general users, navigate across Spotbit and use it with maximum efficiency.

The developer focussed documentation would revolve around:

• Setup & Installation Instructions
• API Documentation (Swagger UI)

The user-focussed documentation would revolve around:

• Application workflow and design interface
• Managing configurations
• Usage of exchanges for averaging

I would also be working on refactoring the README.md file to ensure that the documentation is modularized in effect.

The milestones for this would be:

• Setting up a Documentation Site using Sphinx
• Setting up Swagger UI for the Flask API
• Refactoring and publishing documentation on the Sphinx
• Publishing the documentation over ReadTheDocs

Milestone	Date
Setting up a Documentation Site using Sphinx	July 10
Setting up Swagger UI for the Flask API	July 13
Refactoring and publishing documentation on the Sphinx	July 17
Publishing the documentation over ReadTheDocs	July 20

Given the fact that I have prior experience in Sphinx, I can dually commit to the same.

Right now, the code quality of Spotbit's Flask API is at a lower end. I would be next working on refactoring the code to match the standards we would be looking for in code readability and maintenance.

The milestones for this would be:

• Setting up Code Quality checks using Flake8
• Refactoring the Codebase to suit the purpose of readability
• Setup a CI pipeline for automated checks

Milestone	Date
Setting up Code Quality checks using Flake8	July 22
Refactoring the Codebase to suit the purpose of readability	July 26
Setup a CI pipeline for automated checks	July 27

Setting up CI pipelines

I would also be working on developing consistent CI pipelines and project management tools and bots to be used with GitHub.

This project would concern around the following:

• Consistent GitHub Repo labels
• Local Electrum Server on Regtest
• Adding GitHub Actions for Blockchain Commons Website

I would also forward on identifying further areas where CI pipelines can be set up for automated checks. An extra area of focus would be on adding Issue/PR Templates across all of the repositories.

Milestone	Date
Consistent GitHub Repo Labels	July August 31
Local Electrum Server on Regtest	August 3
Adding GitHub Actions for Blockchain Commons Website	August 7

Progress Made

I have successfully executed one of the Community Issues around Sponsor Listing. The Pull Request has been merged to achieve the same.

[gorazdko]

Setting up Code Quality checks using Flake8

Refactoring the Codebase to suit the purpose of readability

I'm not sure how useful that would be as you already pointed out correctly yourself:

Right now, the code quality of Spotbit's Flask API is at a lower end.

I'd rather see spotbit rewritten from scratch instead of refactoring it. Not the whole project but only the essential part. Polling prices from a few different exchanges and making them available over spotbit via http request, i.e. /now, /now/exchange (or sth basic like that)
Anything else above that (install script, testing over Tor etc. ) would be bonus features or a new project for sb else

Here are some notes I made about the current status of spotbit:

Abstract

There is a problem with spotbit, i.e. a server running spotbit gets clogged up (e.g. CPU rises to 100%)
which results in a server failure. This is caused by spotbit which ends up in a deadlocked state when writing and reading from its database (this happens because spotbit is accessing db with multiple threads). This is not just a bug, but rather a flaw in architecture. So we need to redesign and rewrite spotbit from scratch.

Possible solution:

Change architecture to: asyncio + flask like framework that supports asyncio

asyncio is essential to get rid of the threads

• first recreate what we have now with asyncio without using a DB. This will support
  commands such as /now /now/exchange
• secondly, introduce the DB (influxdb) if we want to additionally support somewhat historical prices

The first part is easier and essential whereas the second part is larger in scope (is considered a new project) and should be started with only after the first part is thoroughly tested and reviewed.