Technical-Debt on Sergio Comerón Blog

Technical debt, part 4: I thought I was done… and the last one still reloaded the whole page

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:30:00 +0200

I’ve caught the bug and I couldn’t stop. So, taking advantage of it being Sunday, I sat down to knock out another loose end of the plugin. And this came out.

In part three I signed off saying the big refactor was done: external.php, lib.php, the video call and view.php. And it was… almost. Because while refactoring view.php I left, on purpose, one loose end for later: the recordings table. It was the last corner of the plugin still doing things like it’s 2015 —reloading the whole page every time you delete, hide or add a recording— with all the HTML of each row stitched by hand.

Technical debt, part 3: I refactored a 1,000-line view… and underneath was a query scanning the whole log table

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Third and final part of the technical-debt series on my Jitsi-for-Moodle plugin. In part 1 I broke apart two “god files”; in part 2 I took apart the 924-line video-call function. One monster remained: view.php, the page the student or teacher sees when entering the activity. 971 lines mixing everything.

I refactored it with the usual recipe. But this time the refactor itself is the least of it —it’s the same pattern as the previous parts—. What was interesting was what showed up when I lifted the rugs: a query scanning the whole site’s log table, a cache hiding it, an N+1, a bug that let you record and stream at once, and a couple of “time capsules” buried in the code.

Technical debt, part 2: "moving wasn't improving", so this time I actually took it apart

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:00:00 +0200

In part one I left you at the worst possible moment: with a lesson half-kept. The moral of that post was “moving isn’t improving”, and I illustrated it with my worst piece of code —a nearly 924-line function that builds the video call— which I did exactly that to: I moved it without touching the inside. It was still there, intact, spitting out HTML and some 600 lines of hand-concatenated JavaScript. Fixing it “later” was the promise.

Paying down the technical debt in my Moodle plugin: splitting two "god files"

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0200

If you use mod_jitsi and you’ve noticed it hasn’t shipped anything new lately, it’s not that I’ve shelved it — quite the opposite. These days I’m deep in the biggest technical-debt cleanup I’ve ever done on the plugin — the one that brings Jitsi video calls into Moodle — and that’s eating all the time that would normally go to new features. It’s all still on the dev branch, unpublished: work in progress.