#029

Work

This week we rolled out the upgrade to Elasticsearch 5 to production and, to make it even better, we did that in the middle of some network connectivity problems which were breaking the Elasticsearch 2-powered bits of the site. This came after we finished analysing the results of the top 10,000 search terms drawn from a 6-month period, and didn’t find any changes significant enough to cause concern.

I’m told this migration will result in savings of £35,000 a year¹ but, oddly, the letter announcing my immediate £35k raise doesn’t seem to have come through.
I found out what’s going on next quarter. I’ll be on the “Bravigation” team, or the “Brexit Navigation” team, or the “Making Brexit Content Easier To Find” team (depending on how formal you’re being), which covers a few different search-related tasks. One of those tasks is upgrading to Elasticsearch 6, which hopefully won’t take the full quarter this time. I believe they also want to look into using newer Elasticsearch features, now that we’re not on quite so ancient a version.

A set up Pleroma, an ActivityPub server, so that I could have the CI job which builds memo.barrucadu.co.uk send a notification. The script to send the notification is in the memos git repository.
I switched my CI from Jenkins to Concourse. I wrote a memo which talks about how I set it up and gives some motivation. If you’re reading this memo, it’s working.
I read Roadside Picnic, a book about the aftermath of aliens visiting Earth, not noticing humans at all, and leaving behind a bunch of junk. It was enjoyable.

I believe a big chunk of this number is based on an estimate of developer-time required for future upgrades, as new Elasticsearch versions come out frequently. We weren’t spending £35,000 extra on VMs (I hope).↩︎