Work
Implementation of the RFC has begun. I’m aiming for a gradual switch from the current way things work to the new way they should work. It’s more awkward to do it this way, but means we’re maintaining backwards compatibility every step of the way. So if something goes wrong, we can revert the last change we made to the affected microservice, rather than needing to unpick a tangled mess across multiple services.
Well, that’s the idea.
And it turns out that the first such step, changing the way we pass some state from the Transition Checker to the Account Manager resulted in a net reduction in complexity and in lines of code, and is much more standard practice than what we were doing. If we’d thought to do it this way from the beginning, we’d have avoided some of the problems we hit along the way.
As the saying goes, weeks of programming can save you hours of planning.
Books
This week I read:
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks, the tenth and last of the Culture series.
This was great, I enjoyed it a lot more than I did Surface Detail. Though I found myself wondering at times why Banstegeyn was putting so much effort into keeping the secret, when if anything his methods were the ones threatening confidence in the subliming. And also it was a bit weird to refer to non-hyperspace as “the Real”, when previously that term had only been used to mean “the non-simulated world”.
I find myself running low on book series to read. I only have the two sequels of Neuromancer and part two of The Book of the New Sun to go. I’ll have to pick up something new.
The Great Indoors by Emily Anthes.
This is all about how architecture affects our health, moods, and behaviours, and the growing field of evidence-based building design. It’s pretty interesting, it covers things from the microbes you might find living in your shower head, to the sort of buildings we could have on Mars one day. Fitting, given recent events.
Miscellaneous
Setting up my new RPG blog is going well. I’ve published two posts, but want to have two in draft and five more outlined before publicising it anywhere. I figure once a month is a good minimum posting frequency, so that would give me content for the next 7 months in varying stages of completion.