#023

I was off on Monday.

I did some work to make it possible to remove the elasticsearch 2 search service and switch entirely to the new elasticsearch 5 one. This was pretty straightforward, and is an essential part of testing the switch-over in integration and staging (and then doing it in production).

The rest of the week I worked on changing our elasticsearch index schemas to be compatible with elasticsearch 6. Elasticsearch 6 only allows you to have a single type in each index, but we have several. We decided to add our own type field (rather than split everything up into separate indices) as a simple-ish solution. Naturally this required a lot of changes, as the communication with elasticsearch isn’t nicely isolated to just one place. A nicer solution, possible if that had been the case, would be to just modify the one module which talks to elasticsearch, allowing the rest of the code to keep using the old _type field.

Importing data and querying things seems to work. On Monday I’m going to test out publishing things and make sure they still arrive in the index with the correct type. This change to mapping types is the single biggest issue with migrating to elasticsearch 6, so we definitely want to solve it sooner rather than later, even though we’re still aiming to migrate only to elasticsearch 5 this quarter.

I read Annihilation, the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, about a part of the United States designated “Area X”, which is surrounded by an invisible border and within which strange things happen. There’s a 2018 film adaptation which I enjoyed, but it’s pretty confusing. The book manages to be more eerie and also make more sense.

Area X in the film gave me a strong The Colour out of Space feeling. The book much less so, it felt more unique while retaining the general sense of cosmic horror.

I finished off the fermented carrots I made last month, and have started fermenting some chillies, onions, and smoked garlic, for a hot sauce. I’ll know in about a month if it’s worked out.