In week 8 I gave our account management backend it’s annual overhaul. Last week it was AirlineSim’s turn!
As discussed, I am currently in the process of giving most of our systems a proper spring cleaning, meaning I upgrade all the libraries and frameworks they depend on to the respective latest versions. Since I’ve been doing this fairly regularly over the past couple of years, the process has become a bit less painful. Meaning there are less “breaking changes” and the ones that are introduced are easier to deal with.
As such, the upgrade of AirlineSim itself is more or less completed on a technical level (code compiles, application runs, tests pass). What remains is more manual testing as well as upgrading some of the minor dependencies. Once that’s done, I’ll look into a few more issues that have been reported in recent weeks and bundle it all up into a maintenance patch to (hopefully) be released later this week.
In other news, I spent the first couple of days of last week on implementing some backend tooling to help with new accounts stuck in limbo because Microsoft won’t accept emails from us at the moment. So if you have a hotmail, live or outlook address, I highly recommend you check whether you are actually receiving emails from us. And in either case, using a different provider might be a good idea 
. I am talking to Microsoft’s support about the issue, but let’s say it’s more of a…uhm…monolog 
Last but not least, not everything is about development: On Friday, Michi and I got started on using a new tool that we hope will help us with influencer marketing, the only kind of marketing that’s been somewhat successful for us in recent years. We are only just learning the ropes of this tool, but it looks very promising. The idea is to automate a lot of the manual work required in finding influencers that would be a good fit for our (very niche) titles. That way, we have a much larger pool of candidates to get in touch with and more time to actually do so. The goal of this is that they either try our games and produce content about them (Let’s Plays and similar formats) or that we can strike a sponsorship deal. I guess I’ll report on our experience in the not-so-far future!