Ever wondered what the evolution of whales and AirlineSim have in common? Yeah, me neither 
But still…I find the analogy funny: Because whales are mammals, when you look at their skeleton, you will find little stumps towards the rear that used to be legs. They serve no purpose and they aren’t visible from the outside. But they are there.
I had to think of this when I ran into an exception earlier last week that read: “obsolete”. A couple of weeks earlier I put in this exception in a piece of code that I thought was…well…obsolete. The code in question would look up airlines by the moderator that accepted or rejected them. As you know, we don’t have anything along those lines in the game. You just create an airline and get started. But it wasn’t always like that: In the early days of the game, we had less than a handful of game worlds. Opening new ones required convincing our then-publisher to set up a new server. Which then took several weeks to get done. Consequently, spots in these game worlds were scarce. And the expectations of the community in terms of realism and plausibility of airline names etc. were a lot higher back then. So we actually screened every single new airline…when you registered, you first had to wait until a moderator let you pass. We got rid of this fairly quickly…but to this day, a lot of traces of this remain “in AirlineSim’s skeleton”. Including references to moderators that need to be cleared when a user is deleted, for example.
But fun analogies aside, I finally managed to wrap up the bulk of the code migration last week. Wednesday night I took care of the last remaining code changes, arriving at this final tally:
Calling it “final” might be a bit premature, though: When I loaded this new version into our internal test server for the first time on Thursday, I entered “phase 2” of the project: Fixing all the bugs caused by changing around 20k lines of code with minimal testing in between. Although it wasn’t as bad I was afraid it would be - most things work pretty much as usual from a user’s perspective - I see a lot of errors in the logs related to conflicting writes to the database because so much changed under the hood of our data access layer. Resolving these has taken many hours already and will keep me busy over the coming week as well. But I haven’t given up hope that work on actual feature development is “just around the corner” 
