Changelog, Sunday 25th August 2024

Last-minute site changes, io refactoring, Appraisals API, marker parsing, and the Chief Tractor award.

This week, we made the decision to move away from Hugo for our new site and towards Nextjs, which also powers our app frontends. Elliot was the real hero of the week, rewriting every template, adding image optimisations, sorting out the hosting, and nudging the site towards pixel-perfection with the designs. So much so, in fact, I invented a new weekly accolade–Chief Tractor–which Elliot accepted gracefully.

I had some downtime, so did a bit of refactoring that I've been putting off for a while. io, our data ingestion engine, is some of the oldest code in the codebase, and I'm a much better golang programmer now. So I spent half a day tidying everything up, bringing it in line with the rest of our go code, and also renamed various components to make them slightly less ambiguous.

Henry has been getting marker running on our production infra. A lot of what we do is parse PDFs. No PDF parser is perfect, but like Tolstoy's unhappy families they are imperfect in different ways. Something we've discovered is that we can use multiple parsers simultaneously and get an LLM to reconcile the differences. Marker is pretty good and open source (so we can pay for it with our Google Cloud Platform credits.)

I also made some more progress on the core product, building out the new API for the appraisal flow. Our existing appraisal API has served the MVP well, but it's extremely brittle, and we have a long list of new datasets to add and new ways of querying them. It was good to get back to core product work. The website and rebrand has been a fun distraction, but it has been a distraction. So it's time to refocus on what we're here to do: understand the planning system.