Sunday, March 09, 2014

#Reasonator - bugs and a different kind of awesome

Unlike Pallas Athena, Reasonator did not rise fully armed out of the head of Zeus. It has developed incrementally and every now and then it has its moments where bug manifest itself. It is software and, Magnus does a splendid job at terminating bugs.

The typical workflow is as follows:
  • build a feature
  • test in test
  • promote to live environment
  • bug Magnus with a bug (reiterate process)
This works well enough. Typically the environment Reasonator operates in is stable and bugs are obvious. Sometimes there are issues. Issues like a major re-write of functionality and an upgrade of the Labs environment. This is when the unexpected happens and bugs have an impact on functionality.

At this moment the update process kills Reasonator. But as the show must go on, it is better to do away with updates for some time until there is a bug fix. At this moment the daily backups are not available in the new Labs environment. The problems with updates cannot be limited to only one day.. BUMMER

The good news is that one bug has been found and fixed. It was late so it was time to sleep. Today it will be time to test. When things turn out to be fine, the update process will run again and both Reasonator and WDQ will provide near real time results from Wikidata.

It is when all the small things that happen every day that amount to so much start to show up again.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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