Recently, I started contributing to NUSMODS. I always thought that the site was feature-complete, so I didn’t really think about contributing to it. After meeting one of the maintainers, I realized that they needed some hands on deck. The folks at NUSMODS have been working on user accounts for a long time and the progress has stalled for awhile. This is a super useful feature for things like forums and better comment sections.
The current comment section of NUSMODS uses Disqus. As noted in this blog post, Disqus is terrible for site performance. So, having user accounts would allow better alternatives like Commento. So I’ve started helping with the front-end for authentication.
Adding Disqus increased my page weight by over 10x and my request count by over 6x
Recently, I also joined the maintainers in updating NUSMODS configurations for the new academic year. It was really interesting to learn from the maintainers about how the NUSMODS infrastructure works. I’m going to keep working on NUSMODS and hopefully we’ll be able to roll out user accounts soon.
