#288

Mar 24, 2024

Work

This was my last week on the old team—Payment Flows, which looks after the actual movement of money and payment timings—and next week I begin on the next: Merchant Engagement, which is a much more frontendy and customer-facing team. The project I was leading has been handed over, and will be launching in about a month. I’ll share more details when it does.

I’m looking forward to getting to work on different sorts of problems and on very different parts of the product.

Books

This week I read:

Roleplaying Games

The Halls of Arden Vul

Another great session this week: little action (though the party did fend off one armour-melting ooze, and hid from a patrol of slavers), much exploration.

The players are pretty cautious, when they see a dangerous obstacle they’re more likely to pull back and take another path than press on. But there are many dangerous obstacles in Arden Vul! So it feels like they’re gradually spreading out, uncovering new things and finding secrets, but ultimately being penned in on all sides as they encounter puzzle-locked doors they don’t know how to open yet, or powerful foes they don’t want to risk facing.

This is useful as a GM, as it means I can predict pretty safely where they might go in advance of the session; but I do want them to discover all the cool-but-dangerous things! I just need to make sure there’s pressure which will force them to overcome their timidity every now and then. For example, they’ve gone to great lengths to avoid the halflings who occupy the Pyramid of Thoth and extort adventurers, but now (due to the players’ earlier actions) the cold war between the goblins and the halflings has become a hot war: the players want to get in good with the goblins, and helping in the struggle would go a long way to achieving that; the status quo is changing day-by-day and someone is going to win the fight whether the players get involved or not…

thing-doer

This week I implemented two new pieces of functionality needed for ReplicaSets, then I took a detour into figuring out how to use the NixOS integration test tooling which led to me discovering (and fixing) a bunch of problems!

The eventual ReplicaSet controller will get the list of pods from the API, work out if any new replicas need to be brought up, and then create those to be scheduled on worker nodes that aren’t running any of the other replicas. It’ll then add those pods to an alias record named after the ReplicaSet, so other pods will be able to communicate with them all.

Then, integration testing:

The integration testing, which started as just a curiosity, has already paid dividends: revealing problems that hadn’t come up at all in my limited manual testing.

Next I’ve started working on a simple API client, as interacting with this by typing out curl commands with big blobs of json isn’t very friendly.

I’ll get to ReplicaSets eventually.