Changelog, Wednesday 25 September 2024

Working with the garage door open

This week, I thought it might be a good idea to explain why we're doing this changelog.

In the first instance, it's to force us to revisit what we do and keep tabs on how much we're getting done, how far we're pushing forward, how much closer we are to reaching our product goals. Context is that which is scarce; whatever you can do to engender it is, on the margin, a good thing.

In the second, it's to demonstrate progress to the people who are watching us from afar. That's investors, potential hires, customers, and competitors. Some weeks what we have achieved can seem underwhelming. But pitching out corrupts within..

In the third, it's to demonstrate a commitment to a culture of quality products. Our paradigmatic value is thoughtfulness. We should be committed to, and proud of, that value.

So, what have we been up to this week?

It was, I'm afraid, a frustrating one.

I made some changes to the Appraise API, the most important of which was getting it to build appraisal results in the worker queue. We have decided on a predominately async process model, since we have so much random backend things to do on a given query, but that means extra scaffolding around, eg., state management. So there are, as ever, trade-offs. I also reworked our geocursor implementation – something neat that we'll open source soon, I hope – as well as redesigned the transactional emails so they are more in-line with our new branding.

Elliot got stuck into the remaining tail of the data fetchers – some of the oldest code in the company – checking that they ran properly, rewriting them when they didn't. Since I left the code and data sourcing in a terrible mess, this took up a large part of the week.

Henry spent a full day building getting prompt caching working, only to discover that it actually didn't work very well for our use case and with our pile of RAG infra.

But this was only a couple of days, and I had a bunch of admin to do, then I had to travel, and my wife got sick, and the wheels fell off the week a little. Henry has had some personal problems to attend to back home. Elliot got sick.

It hasn't been fun, and it hasn't been especially productive, which has been compounded by the fact that we are rushing to get Appraise launched by the end of the month.

But there are always weeks like this. And we will get better.