library

You know, whenever anybody asks Elon [Musk] how he learned to build rockets, he says, 'I read books.' Well, it's true. He devoured those books.
~ Jim Cantrell, Aerospace consultant, on Elon Musk

Why?

Reading books allows you to acquire in a few hours or days, the knowledge that the author a few years to research, synthesise and collate.

dwyl has a good-sized collection of books on a variety of subjects, chiefly:

• Programming
• Business / startups
• Psychology

We look to actively encourage dwylers to borrow and use these books (see dwyl/summer#31) but routinely run up against a few issues problems which we need to resolve:

• With no way of tracking who has borrowed these books, they are often forgotten and go missing (ontop of this we share an office space where we don't have the contact details for those who are not dwylers)
• It became clear from our previous attempts to capture key lessons and feedback from the books that were read (by asking people to PR to this md file), that if this process is in any way onerous, it will not be done and the knowledge will be lost
• Current requests for books are verbal and we need a more efficient way of capturing this so that we can automate the decision-making process

What?

Preliminary research indicates that the current open source library software that exists is both complex and adheres to the rules that govern traditional libraries.

We aim to build something simple which minimises dependencies (reducing maintenance) and is fully tested.

The embryonic first iteration of the application will allow dwylers to carry out a small number of essential tasks:

• Search for books
• See the information for the searched book
• Determine whether or not the book already exists in the dwyl library
• If the book is part of the library:
  • Open the listing to see more information
  • Check whether the book is currently checked out by another dwyler
    • If this is the case, add themselves to a waitlist for the book which triggers an email to the current dwyler who has the book to let them know someone else has an interest in reading the book (MVP iteration)
  • If the book is part of the library and available, check it out
• If the book is not part of the library:
  • Add a request for dwyl to acquire the book
  • This must include filling in a one question form to explain why
  • Allow an admin to mark the book as part of the library, so that when new books are purchased they can easily be added
• Check in the book when it is returned
  • This should include adding the answer to two short questions as a review
• Favourite the book

Running the Library locally

To run the Library locally clone the repo, install the node modules, initialise the database and finally start the server:

git clone https://github.com/dwyl/library.git
cd library
mix deps.get
cd assets && npm i && cd ..
mix do ecto.create, ecto.migrate, phx.server

If the above commands don't work, make sure you have Phoenix 1.3 and Postgres installed on your machine.