Changelog, Monday 09 September 2024

Database standardisation, RAG, settlement hierarchies and APIs

Codebases develop a patina, in the same way that surfaces do. Over time you add a little bit here, refactor a little there, and before you know it it has taken on a texture that seems both familiar and shabby. The oldest bits of the Tract codebase are now over a year old, from my earliest experiments with importing data and throwing it up on a web map. Even our Appraise tool, which we are racing to finish by the end of harvest and drilling, is no longer new.

And while this scuffing is familiar, it's also starting to look run down. Wouldn't it be nice to polish the table before we set it for Christmas? That's what Elliot's been doing this week: polishing the table. Renaming queries, standardising table names, simplifying, dropping, altering, tidying.

Henry has been working on our RAG pipeline, allowing us to extract settlement hierarchies.

I have been doing an assortment of odd bits. As we expand the team the role of CEO gets more varied, and I am spending less time writing code, but it's important to me that I keep one foot in the product. This week, that means working on the appraisals API. We had a couple of problems with the buyer requirements form that we didn't get fixed before the website launch, so getting that fixed up was a priority.

These changelogs will get more interesting – I promise!