#170

Dec 19, 2021

Work

I spent this week working on splitting up our giant postgres and mysql RDS instances, giving each app its own instance so that database upgrades are less of a major task: if everything uses one or two huge instances, then to upgrade the huge instances all the apps need to be made compatible and have downtime scheduled at the same time. It’s a lot of work. Having many, smaller, instances makes downtime and suchlike much easier to manage.

It’s been quite nice doing some infrastructure work, as I don’t get to play around with that much these days. The new infrastructure is now in place, but we still need to migrate the data. But that’s a task for next month.

I’m now off work for a week, back for a few days between Christmas and New Year, and then back to work properly from the 4th of January.

Books

This week I read:

Gaming

This week the long-paused D&D campaign was properly cancelled, and the GM started a game of Whitehack. We had planned to do a West Marches style campaign, but we got fewer players than we’d hoped, so it’ll likely be a wilderness exploration focussed campaign where we have several PCs, and mix and match who goes on which adventure.

I’m looking forward to trying it out. Whitehack is firmly in the OSR sphere, but has a nice twist on the traditional class system: the classes themselves are quite broad and interesting, able to handle many different character archetypes, and a lot of the specificity you’d get in other class systems comes from noting down which “groups” you belong to.

For example, my character has the Strong (fighty) class, but is flavoured as a war god’s priest, and so he gets situational benefits from his “Warrior” and “Priest” groups. It’s a bit more flexible than many class-based systems, in which I’d have to chose between a warrior or a priest, and couldn’t have both.