Month: June 2018

In the world of software development, it’s a common thing that you will get some piece of packaged software, stick it into your application, and you’ll get that functionality for free. It’s almost as common a thing that you’ll get some piece of packaged software, stick it into your application, spend 2 hours trying to get it to work, then decide that it’s a piece of crap that doesn’t really work at all. So that’s what I’ve been doing this morning. There’s a rudimentary collection widget that you can currently see on a page like this:

http://extstats.drfriendless.com/collection.html?geek=tallboy

(stick your own BGG user ID in the URL). Today’s job which took a mere 6 hours was to put the data in a table which supports sorting and paging. I hope not every task on this project takes 12 times longer than it should.

I need to start onboarding people to the new site, because some people have been waiting months for any acknowledgement from me that they can have stats. And if I’m going to give users a site under development, I’d better at least have some way of telling them how that development is going. So, there’s a blog. I am not a very arty person so it’s likely to be a kinda clunky boring blog.

Anyway, this evening I’ve been working on getting some bugs out of the downloader. Some people on the user list have deleted their BGG accounts, and the downloader was very confused about why they had no games. So I had to get those people off the list and then get the downloader to delete them from the database.

I also added a dashboard so I can see which Lambda functions are giving errors. That has been extremely useful – you can see the errors dropped off at the end of the night when I’d got some of the bugs out.

For those who know about AWS, the blog is hosted on a teensy weensy EC2 instance. So that bit is not serverless.