README.md

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README.md

@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ Also a way to take a look at and learn elixir and phoenix, which I was unfamilia
 Project is developed with elixir and phoenix.
 Deployed at [rocketsized.com](https://rocketsized.com)
 
-# Developing locally
+## Developing locally
 
 Should have a postgres database on localhost port 5432. Run docker compose to create one.
 
@@ -24,6 +24,34 @@ mix setup
 mix phx.server
 ```
 
+## Development
+
+Chronological explanation on how this project got built. It started mostly as a hobby project to be able to generate a [rockets of the world](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-the-size-of-the-worlds-rockets-past-and-present/) poster on the fly. Also I wanted a project to mess around with tailwind/elixir/phoenix/ecto. I knew exactly how to build it in the tech stacks I'm familiar with, but I wanted a challenge to learn something new.
+
+### Step 1. Data origins
+
+The initial data load was from scraping wikipedia with [Crawly](https://github.com/elixir-crawly/crawly) and parsing with [Floki](https://github.com/philss/floki). Though after loading everything, I had to go back and manually modify some data.
+
+### Step 2. Admin
+
+To modify and edit new data, I considered using one of the phoenix admin generators, though after looking at [kaffy](https://github.com/aesmail/kaffy) and [live_admin](https://github.com/mojotech/torch) I decided I just wanted to learn how to do it from scratch and went ahead and utilized phoenix's crud generators. The admin interface ended up crude, but more than sufficient for my needs
+
+### Step 3. Authentication
+
+I decided to got with the default phoenix security generators, even though new fancy [webauthn](https://github.com/liveshowy/webauthn_components) implementations on the horizon, since this is more about learning phoenix itself. Turned out mostly adequate.
+
+### Step 3. Flop
+
+For the frontend filter decided to use a dedicated library for filtering with query parameters - [Flop](https://github.com/woylie/flop). Refactored the code several times with a more custom filters -> query params implementation, because the default one from FLop seemed rather tedious.
+
+### Step 4. Rect Layout
+
+Decided to go with svg as a render file format, so that it can be more portable to different file format. But since relative positioning is quite limited, I had to implement a graphics library to help position the various rockets correctly. Split this effort out to its own package - [rect_layout](https://github.com/ivank/rect_layout)
+
+### Render pipeline
+
+Added a pipeline to create and transform graphical files, so that the svgs can be downloaded in other formats. After some testing it turned out that the SVG is quite complex and cannot be correctly displayed by cairo or rsvg packages. Would need to investigate further, but left the render pipeline so it can be used again.
+
 ## Copyright
 
 Apache License 2 - 2023 Ivan Kerin, Read the [LICENSE](./LICENSE) file.