#025

This week I went on support on Wednesday. Before then I did some smallish tasks relating to upgrading elasticsearch: updating our data sync process¹ to work with an AWS managed elasticsearch 5; and wrote a plan for how we do the final steps of switching off the elasticsearch 2 service and removing the stuff we’ve put in place to support two search services running in parallel.

On Wednesday morning the GOV.UK frontend apps migrated to AWS. This has been in the works for a while, and has so far made for a busy few days. Everything has mostly worked, but there have been a few issues:

• Some of our apps in AWS were running a fairly old version, and needed to be re-deployed to the correct versions.
• Problems with redirects and hostnames, now that we have a few new not-publicly-routable hosts.
• On Thursday morning we restored (rather than took) a backup of our router database, which meant anything published on the 6th existed in the content API, but couldn’t be accessed.
• We had a bunch of assets from old deploys in our old hosting provider, which didn’t exist in AWS. Some people were hotlinking these (which we say you shouldn’t do, but they do).
• The secret key used to generate JSON web tokens was inconsistent between the two environments, so links to manage your email subscription preferences didn’t work.
• The robots.txt was configured to block everything.

So it’s been pretty hectic at times, but on the other hand this is a good way to test a lot of assumptions our code makes, and to make things more robust for the future.

I’ve also “solved” a huge number of support tickets now, because I’ve been the one replying to them saying “Yes, we had a problem, but it’s fixed now.”

Other than AWS migration issues, the biggest proportion of support work is data.gov.uk related. Of the 17 open tickets currently, 12 of them are about data.gov.uk. I think we do seem to be solving entire classes of problems and reducing the support burden, gradually, but there’s still a way to go.

I read We Sold Our Souls, about a metal band who… sold their souls. Terry, one member of the band, made a deal to be a famous musician, and rather than sell his own soul he used the souls of his bandmates. The book follows Kris, one of the band members, who figures out (decades later) that something is up, and goes to confront Terry.

It was an enjoyable read, I got through it in one sitting, but a key component of the story just doesn’t make sense. The last album Kris wrote before her soul was sold, Troglodyte, turns out to be prophetic, and guides her in circumventing Terry’s eyes and ears (which are everywhere). It’s made pretty clear that the devils (for lack of a better term) feel threatened in some way by Troglodyte, and that’s why they want Kris caught.

But as Troglodyte was written before her soul was sold, is it just a coincidence that it prophesies a way to confront Terry? Why would a normal person have the gift of prophecy? It would make more sense if she wrote the album after she lost her soul, but another key part of the story is that soulless people can’t be truly creative or inspired, so that wouldn’t have worked either.

Good book, as long as you don’t think about it.

I gave Spacemacs a go, which is Emacs set up to work nicely with evil, the extensible Vi layer for Emacs. It also has a different configuration system than regular emacs, based on self-contained community-contributed chunks of configuration called “layers”. I was mostly interested in the layers system, because my Emacs config has a lot of cruft.

One thing I immediately discovered is that there’s loads of “Spacemacs for Vi users” blog posts and guides, but almost no “Spacemacs for Emacs users”. In fact, one such guide I found recommended that an Emacs user learn Spacemacs by making Vi their main editor for a month or two first! I didn’t much like the idea of using a strictly inferior editor², so I decided to struggle on with my limited knowledge of Vi commands: dd, :wq, i, and esc.

To my surprise, I didn’t like the “layers” configuration model but did like the evil integration. Layers felt like too much conceptual abstraction. Also it wouldn’t let me use C-c as a leader key, which I’ve been doing in my regular Emacs config for ages now, and I didn’t want to give up that muscle memory. There’s probably a way to unbind what was bound to C-c but it wasn’t immediately obvious and I didn’t know what to look for.

So I spent a little time on Friday and Saturday going through my Emacs config: removing things I didn’t use, adding evil integration, looking for new things. Sometimes it’s nice to go over the configuration of a tool you use every day and make sure it’s still set up in the way you like.