Hello noders, and welcome to this month's root log. There's a lot of work in progress, and unfortunately this month was taken up handling one major new upgrade in particular, and the thirty or so tendrils that the bug has created. I haven't squashed them all, but I wanted to put something into production.
First, the stability problems are on their way to being fixed. Deployments are especially fraught, but it's because of the warm-up problem on the webserver daemon. Due to the move to Fargate, we've inherited a few startup problems that I think are now on their way towards being fixed. At the absolute least, I have my hands around these issues, have applied some fixes that match the problems and will be monitoring over the next few days. It's not a code problem that is involved with the data, but startup problems associated with load balancer stabilization and the way that the instances respond to ELB requests. For now I've set the Health Check code to 400 (which is totally asinine), and will fix the way the daemons respond to health checks in the next few days.
This month's update is all around New Writeups. I've accomplished two major things this month:
- New Writeups is now 100% responsive ReactJS and API-based. If you change the number of writeups shown, it automatically changes it and saves the preference. That's it; it took about a month of effort.
- Because everything is JSON and JSON is UTF-8 by default, I've found and fixed a pile of UTF-8 issues. This is huge, as they were plaguing the site in strange ways, but I found a couple of core engine bugs that appear to have corrected the problem. Non-ASCII text should continue to work the way we expect
Editors now see different glyphs (FontAwesome/react-icons) for writeup visibility. This is another part of the API and has been a part of demonstrating new code features.
Over the next few months we will be converting over all of the nodelets and moving the layout to be able to tackle superdocs in React, eliminating the need for the majority of the code in the database. It will make OBE the templating system in Mason2 and pave the way for the new layout. I'm still researching how best to do the wireframes, and will be looking for more design helpers in the next few months after we knock out the rest of the JavaScript work. The underlying engine stuff is largely in good shape, so it's block and tackle from here.
I have a few Amazon bugs to knock out before we go too far down the road of more JavaScript fixes, and I need to finish ripping out the old tendrils of the original New Writeups (now newwriteups2 under the hood). Once this is done, we'll continue to knock out nodelets.
Thank you all for the bug reports and layout feedback. Keep em comin'.
-jay
Sneaky UTF-8 test: é