Challenges
We had a fair bit of challenges in the backend and UI. In the backend, we spent a lot of time getting the ActionMailer to work. The biggest problem there was that Gmail authenticates sender information and our app needed to send emails to users from a typical @gmail account. In addition, we also struggled after the Trefle API was discontinued. That API powers the chatbot and our plants database. We quickly implemented a fallback to solve that issue. We also could not get CableReady/StimulusReflex and Redis working to make our app refreshes automatically when someone gets a notification. We dropped that quickly because we wanted to work on adding more features over polishing up existing features (e.g. the notifications work with refreshing; so, it was not a priority to get them to work without that). After the mimemagic library got yanked, we had trouble with our GitHub actions CI, particularly for running tests. We were not able to solve that. In the UI, we had problems adding responsiveness with JavaScript but we were able to overcome that. We also had common CSS problems like making the footer stick to the bottom of all pages but we were also able to solve that.