Given that I set out to have a week of boring backend development, it turned out to be rather exciting.
First and obviously, there was the start of another round for Domination, this time with the experimental Single Holding Mode. I’m looking forward to how this will turn out. So far, there was only a handful of people who ran into the restriction by accident and required my help 
Also rather exciting, in the most positive sense, was the fact that people didn’t order just one, not just two, but actually three (!) exclusive game worlds in a single week. This is the all-time record by far and really helps keeping things going around here 
Exciting, but not in a good way: On Friday, our automated build pipeline, which runs whenever a change is committed (be it new translations, data changes or actual code changes), suddenly broke. At first, our ops partner thought it was their fault as they were working on an optimisation at the time. But we quickly realised it wasn’t them: One of our dependencies, one we’ve been using for what must be well beyond a decade now, stopped to resolve.
My initial suspicion was that their package repository was having a bad day. But it quickly turned out this wasn’t it. In fact, this was “intentional”: Said dependency - a library we use to run highly concurrent code (like ORS/DS stuff and entity operations) - switched from a proper Open Source license to a so-called “Business Source License” a while ago. Back then, the developers claimed it would remain freely available for small companies with revenues below certain thresholds which we would likely never cross. But apparently, this didn’t work well enough for them, so now they’ve started to put the screws on. You now need a tokenized URL to access their repo and for that you need an account with them. Without much of a choice I set up the account, got the URL, configured it, pushed the change and ta-da…it worked again!
But shortly after, our monitoring reported that the two game worlds with the new version - our internal test server and Paine - were building up backlog. I checked the logs and it looked like a random bug, so I restarted them and things looked good again. For a few minutes. Then the problem re-appeared.
Turns out: The terms for that library have changed and you now need to have a production license key. Without one, the library will just stop working. Not at application launch…no…a few minutes later. I have a hard time keeping my language civilised here, but you can probably imagine my “frustration”.
Long story short: For now, I am using a development key in production - technically a violation of terms - until I’ve had a chat with their sales rep. But that’s just going to be to buy time: I already made the decision last Friday that this library has to go. As soon as possible.
In the light of the above, I think I’ll postpone talking about my actual work on our account management systems to next week…again 