Weeknotes 127

A new feature in Rails – ErrorReporter#unexpected to report in production but raise in development

This method is intended for reporting violated assertions about preconditions, or similar cases that can and should be gracefully handled in production, but that aren’t supposed to happen.

My podcast player of choice, Castro, had a FOUR DAY outage that ran into this week. It was very inconvenient.

We’re aware of the current database issue and working hard to resolve this as quickly as possible.

Really, the whole debacle is a lesson in how to communicate with your users i.e., you should communicate with your users. One or two tweets is not sufficient.

The app changed hands a few years ago and since then it’s been going downhill, so this is disappointing, but not that surprising. Unfortunately, the design of a lot of other podcast players leaves a lot to be desired, at least to my eyes.

It was proper cold this week. I am woefully under prepared for it.

Up (across?) to London on Thursday for King Lear in the West End. I’ve never seen any Shakespeare before, and it wouldn’t be my first choice, but enjoyed what I understood of it.

The journey back was very chaotic as our train was cancelled (due to industrial action which wasn’t supposed to be happening), and we eventually, with several hundred other people, managed to get aboard a train that headed in the general direction of home.

I’m pretty quick over a short distance, if I’m running with a suitcase up a train platform.

I’m off to London for work tomorrow. Will I ever get back?

Three had a major outage whilst I was in London which affected Smarty, my mobile provider. Their handling of the incident was not good with much cutting and pasting of answers on Twitter.

I was looking to move anyway as their signal just cannot compare to EE. Seems now is the time.

From Shopify:

Shopify’s egress processed 145 billion requests on Friday. App servers handled peak of ~60 million requests per minute. Increase of 38%. Total GMV was $4.1b, up by 22% from last year.

😮

And some more details from Shopify Engineering:

We achieved 99.999+% uptime, handling 29.7 PB of data served from across our infrastructure over the entire event! That’s over 5 TB/min

Blimey!

We saw Napoleon on Saturday. For all it’s incorrect history I enjoyed it well enough. The battle scenes were brutal. Too long though.