At any given time, I usually have several irons in the fire. Some things come with fairly firm deadlines (usually self-imposed), others are just recurring tasks that need doing from time to time (like general maintenance), and then there are projects that simply take longer and are tackled in parallel over extended periods. Last week, I had work across all three of those categories — but only managed to get to two of them. 
Category I (“with a deadline”) was meant to be a refresh of both the AirlineSim and Prosperous Universe Steam clients. AirlineSim’s client is actually a bit newer and more modern than PU’s, but still needs an update. And I’d like to bring PU’s client in line with AirlineSim’s, so we can reduce code duplication and roll out updates more frequently. This project has a “deadline” because I really want to get it done before summer break as this has been pushed back for far too long.
But Category II (“maintenance”), combined with a perfectly timed cold, got in the way: Many of you reported occasional (and rather unsightly) errors, especially on content-heavy pages like large fleets and schedules. As is often the case with bugs like these, the symptoms didn’t clearly point to the underlying cause. So, it took a bit of digging to get to the root of the problem. In the end, the culprit turned out to be (and unfortunately still is) a change to how the data access layer — which I revamped during the “Spring Cleaning” — constructs its database queries. While this doesn’t affect most cases, it causes noticeable slowdowns with large result sets. I’ve tackled the most obvious and frequently reported instances and optimised those queries (see the change log). But this will likely be an ongoing task for a while, as I work through queries where players experience long load times.
I did, however, make some progress on Category III (“long-running dev project”): I continued working on the AirlineSim API, focusing on authentication and authorisation. This is arguably the most important part of the whole project — everything else is a “nice-to-have” or will be added later when other features demand it. That said, the API is still a long way off from being “production-ready”, so there’s more work ahead.
And finally, a quick heads-up: Week 31 will be the last full one before the summer holidays kick off here in Bavaria. I’ll be “on holiday” (at home, sadly) for around two weeks. After that, we’ll shift into “school’s out for four more weeks, but both parents are working” mode. I’ll post a proper announcement later this week, but you heard it here first: Response times might go up a bit, and non-urgent things could take a little longer. Thanks a lot for your understanding. 