In an annoying turn of events at work, I’ve suddenly been asked to make some changes to an app that I wrote about ten years ago, and which was last touched about five years ago (it’s been happily working away in the interim). The catch is that there’s an actual legal deadline for getting the changes live, and it’s about a fortnight after they asked me to start working on it.
In theory it ought to be an easy change, but as you might imagine it’s using ridiculously out of date dependencies, and just getting it to build was quite a struggle. Rather than trying to work my way through a tedious upgrade process, I ended up creating a new Phoenix project (LiveView! No more node.js!) with the latest versions of Erlang, Elixir and all the libraries. I copied the business logic code back in, got those tests passing again, and finally rewrote the small web front end from scratch using LiveView instead of controllers, templates and channels. I more or less got a working CI build going, so now I just need to sort out building and deploying it, plus making the actual enhancement.
On Wednesday we had the annual club Two Rivers handicap race (Landguard Point to Felixstowe Ferry). When we got there Landguard was heaving with Eclipse watchers (not sure why everyone felt the need to go somewhere special to see the sun, which is famously in the sky and pretty much visible from anywhere). Maria had brought some eclipse glasses, so we got to have a peek every now and then, and marvel at a temporary slight reduction in light levels (probably quite a big reduction in reality, but eyes are pretty good at compensating). After the race people fragmented a bit, but our little group ended up in the White Horse, which I think I’ve only been to briefly once or twice before, and always on Christmas pub crawls. Seemed like a friendly place, and they had some folky-type live music going on.
I went down to Totton for the weekend, for Tim’s annual birthday barbecue. 99% of the journey there on Friday went OK, then I spent about an hour queuing in the 1.5 miles between junctions 3 and 2 of the M27, because everyone was forced to leave at 2 because the A31 was closed after a big fire, and I dutifully sat in the left lane, which seemed to come of very much the worst when it came to merging. Anyway, I got to Phil’s eventually, and after getting some chips for dinner we cycled to the New Forest Inn to meet Neil and Jeremy (deliberately) and John and Erica (by coincidence) for a few beers.
On Saturday we walked down to Bartley Park parkrun. Normally I just jog round parkrun chatting these days, but I had a streak to maintain at this venue of having finished in under 22 minutes and in the top ten all three times. I managed to do so for a fourth time, although it was hard work in the heat. In the afternoon Phil got his Land Rover out for a potter through the forest – it’s always funny how friendly everyone is to people driving round in a 60-odd-year-old vehicle with no roof or seatbelts, and with the windscreen folded down!
Saturday evening was the actual barbecue, which as usual is a chance to see people I haven’t seen since the previous year, although a few of the usual suspects were on holiday and missed it. Normally part of the fun is trying to destroy Tim’s chimenea by stuffing as much wood in at once as possible, but this year we sensibly skipped that, what with it being plenty warm enough already, and having been warned by the completely inappropriate use of the government emergency alert system that things might be apt to go on fire.
The journey home on Sunday was a bit quicker (just some traffic around Heathrow), and I had time to go for a little easy run when I got home before cycling into town for Dave’s birthday curry at the Sonar Bangla (followed of course by a couple of extra pints at the Cricketers).