Hello and welcome back. If you saw my brief post yesterday and played with shKGA then you'll notice our shKGA wall a bit more barren today compared to yesterday. There was a bug that deleted some of the original doodling I was doing while testing and even deleted some of the doodles you guys added yesterday. I won't get into the details of the bug (unless you want to know) but I spent this morning testing and fixing the bug, which resulted in more deletions 😥.
Definitely a stark contrast between the two images, hopefully it won't happen again. Good thing it's only been a day and not many people are using it yet. I spent a couple hours this morning and now I think the deletion bug is squashed. Since I was working on shKGA, I also worked on adding proper connectivity statuses. When you're online it will show as such, if it's trying to reconnect it shows that. If you're offline, then that is shown. When offline, if you click the button you'll attempt to reconnect. This was another bug that took some time to squash, since I run the server on my computer when I'm programming, I turned off my wifi and it was still online! It took me a while to figure out that I did have an active connection, and this is because the server was on my computer and the wall was cached in memory. I'll be adding more features, like abilities to snap an image of a portion of the wall to share on other sites!
Bugs, and playing whack-a-mole trying to squash them, tend to be why software developers host multiple instances on "test" or "development" servers. This means data and applications can be updated without touching the main ("production") instances that users are interacting with. I'm just a lone developer, and back of the napkin calculation shows shKGA is going to cost me over $50 CAD per month on bare-bones hardware. I could decrease the costs by maybe half if I was smart, but I use Heroku which has some good features for developers and IT infrastructure management. It's also cheaper than other cloud providers from my experience. I don't want to get into shared hosting with CPanel or other traditional services without the flexibility, and I don't want to manage my own VPC. That said, I definitely pay a premium hosting on Heroku, so I won't be having a "test" infrastructure anytime soon (unless some people want to give me money for it 🤣).
So I don't have much more to discuss, but I did want to make a blog update, so here it is. I'll end this simple post with a small reminder that life is complex and sometimes we need to pick up and explore things we've not bothered to look at before. I hope what I've discussed here helps build your worldview of software development. Software devs do things that anyone can do, but there's more than just writing Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");, there's a lot of thought and creativity that comes with the profession. In my domain of business web applications, there are many areas to dive into the rabbit hole: networking, servers, clients (browsers), optimizations, code patterns, etc. All of these things and many more, including streaming 4k video real-time worldwide, is done with the humble 1 (one) and 0 (zero). How can such realities exist with only two states of on and off? I'm not sure, the nature of reality is fickle but it's fun and allows me to write this blog and share my experiences with you. Have a good one.
Isaac
10PM Update: I fixed the TTS feature I have on the site. It now parses the whole document in a go to determine the number of sentences to effortlessly navigate to any part of the page! Had to squash a few bugs too but wanted to share this here so it's not it's own post tomorrow