37: Discount Manager, Games

2022-12-20 – Tuesday

• Time is the enemy of all software projects
• The discount manager app has stopped working, and everyone who worked on the original project has moved on.
• To be fair, this is the first time in three years it’s stopped working.
• Being the proactive person I am, I pulled the code from the repo and tried to sort out the issue.
• Except for the readme.md that accompanies the repo wasn’t particularly expansive in how to set up and run the project.
• This called for big guns to be pulled out, so I asked Dave and Callum to figure out how to get it working.
• All credit to them; they got the app running pretty quickly, but we still couldn’t connect to the DB.
• The original app was created using a non-standard set of tools, next.js, prisms, and PostgreSQL.
• Note to future self: if you use a non-standard toolchain, you must document the entire setup and config in detail and use it to repo the install and config immediately. Do not skip this step.
• Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the situation I’m in now with a web app that doesn’t work and no immediate prospects of getting it running.
• I wouldn’t have used the Discount manager unless I needed to send out some discount codes.
• So alongside Dave and Callum trying to get the web app running, I spend my time writing a script to send the emails instead.
• The basic script I got running pretty quickly, but it’s the last 20% that gets you.
• As well as sending the emails, I had to report on used codes ( employee number, email and code the user was assigned) and the unsent codes, which provided to take a lot of time.
• For speed, I wrote the script in Python using Jupyter notebook, which has limitations but is a great way to build scripts and debug simultaneously.
• I also discovered that Visual Studio Code renders a Jupyter notebook natively, which is freaking awesome.
• Thankfully the script worked well, so I’ll be able to send out the codes tomorrow morning.

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• Games tonight – The Sock game with Ellie, P for Pizza and the Hilarious Taco, Cat, Goat cheese Pizza.
• I lost every game as usual, but we had good fun.

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• Reading: The Agency by William Gibson (13% Complete)
• World’s: 549 5/6