tl;dr: I needed a client for calling Mixpanel’s API to log telemetry. Existing ones were either C# or Javascript-delivered-over-the-web. I wrote one C++. Find source here, and NuGet here.
In my ever ongoing (6 years!) development of an Instapaper client for Windows, I’ve reached the point where the app is very nearly done. But before I unleashed it on the world, I knew I need to add telemetry to the app. But which service to send it to?
My first requirement was that it had a good library for UWP that was supported in Javascript — e.g. WWA/PWA. The primary motivation wasI didn’t want to add .net to it, since that was another runtime, another garbage collector, another large dependency.
Turns out no one did that. No one has written a C++ client, or a pure JS implementation meant for offline delivery (E.g. in package). So this set me off on a journey to build my own.
Thus my next requirement was a well documented HTTP API: Turns out those are pretty rare too! After much searching I found Mixpanel:
- Great Documentation
- Good reference source to understand those poorly captured peccadilloes
And so I embarked on writing a C++/CX library for uploading to Mixpanel — and 1.5 years later, I’ve finished it, and published v1.0 to the world.
Things that happened along the way:
- Created a background work queue for processing items, and handing off to some other worker. Turns out there aren’t any good, simple ones for C++ — at least that I could find.
- Learned all about using the stl threading primitives for my worker. I still don’t quite get why there isn’t “Mutex” in the STL that I can create and wait on till it’s signaled — since it really tries hard to take ownership on creation, and on obtaining the lock (rather than waiting to be signaled)
- Created many unit tests to make sure I wasn’t a muppet. And proved that just because you have unit tests doesn’t mean you got it right (see the most recent unit test I added)
- Learned about creating & publishing nuget packages, including getting an update published to the nuget documentation.
- Thought way to deeply about the overall architecture
- Accepted the right thing to do was make private APIs visible to my test code to keep a clean public API
Anyway, I hope it’s useful to someone that isn’t me, and I’m interested in feedback, and suggestions.