Nah, I’m not going to go all Eminem and aggressive and stuff. I’ve literally been cleaning stuff up today. It was a great, productive day. There were a couple of users that I added over a week ago, and before advising them that their pages were ready, I decided to check whether they were, and they weren’t. This is the sort of bug that cannot be tolerated. With 3034 users, stuff’s got to work without me watching it.
So I hunted down what the problem was, and discovered that I’d modified some SQL in a buggy way a couple of weeks ago, and then swallowed the error so that I never noticed. So I fixed the SQL and the users started being created.
But they still weren’t coming through properly, so I investigated further. There were half a dozen or so users who had deleted themselves from BGG, and so I was unable to process. Yet I kept trying to, every minute. So I deleted them. And then there was one user whose BGG collection is so big that BGG just tells me it’s too big. I’m not sure what to do about that.
You will notice in the graph below of Lambda invocations that there was a solid orange band at the bottom. That was just doing broken things over and over. Oh, and by the way, I pay for the height of this graph – lambda invocations cost some tiny amount of money. The right hand end of the graph shows how much the orange band decreased after fixing that stuff up. It will cost me a bit this month (like, a dollar), but next month it should be better.
These sorts of problems can’t be allowed to persist. So I wrote some code to send errors to the database. When errors happen in the hundreds of thousands of lambda invocations per month, I don’t necessarily notice them. If I write them to the database I can at least find them. With any luck I will find the next similar problem faster.
So then after cleaning that up, the new users started working properly, and I had a clear conscience. I then started emailing people who have been waiting to be added to the site to tell them that there was a new site and they were added. I emailed 280 people, some of whom had been waiting for 18 months. I hope they still play board games.
Anyway, whether or not they still remember who I am, it was nice to get 280 messages out of my inbox, and to have that weight of guilt lifted from my shoulders after such a long time. On the other hand, I’ve increased my potential active users by 280, and that might reveal some other problems. I don’t expect it will be too much, as the architecture I’ve chosen is nothing if not scalable, but you never know. The database is a non-scalable weak link, but I think the impact of users is trivial compared to the impact of the downloader.
And then, because I’m hyperactive or something (not to mention that the weather outside was a bit yukky, so I wasn’t tempted to do anything else), I updated my spreadsheet of ongoing costs. It was 3 months behind.
May 2019 shows a jump in Lambda costs, due to the Kaboom I blogged about previously. It was only $6, but it was an architectural problem that was going to stick around and cost more each month until I dealt with it. Hence why things like that get my attention sooner than actual useful features, and get blogged about.
The kaboom happens about every 35 days, which puts the next one in the first few days of July. Due to the dithering I put in, and fixing the huge database index bug, I don’t expect a big kaboom, just more of a tremor. And due to the continued effect of the dithering, that will become less every 35 days.
The next thing I’m hoping to work on is the update schedule page. It’s not a headline feature, more of a necessary evil. Also I logged a play from October last year, today, so I need it myself. And of course so does everyone from time to time.
Work also continues on the login stuff that I mentioned in the blog post about sticking the cookie. Now that the cookie is working, I need all the bits of code to use it properly, or they won’t be able to access user data. And then I want to write more code which reads and writes user-specific data so I can realise some benefits from all of that mucking around.
Auth0 tells me I have 138 users with accounts, which I think is pretty wonderful since having an account is of little use. But it’s supposed to be a feature, so let me make it that way!
