Last week I already announced what I’d do in week 27: Address all the initial bug reports I received after rolling out the gen-3 UI to Paine. Fortunately, while there were a few tickets on my to-do list, none of them were big issues, so I got all of them out of the way by Tuesday morning.
I then moved on to a brief analysis of ITR booking behavior in Paine to see which parameters might require adjustments before I can roll out the feature to a new temporary game world. Based on the outcome, I applied a handful of tweaks and waited until Friday to repeat my analysis and to see whether the changes showed the desired effect. While there are always more knobs to fiddle with, I decided the outcome was satisfactory, so my plan remains to launch a new temporary game world with ITRs soon. Likely later this week already.
After some boring but necessary marketing work and relaunching a couple of exclusive game worlds, I finally managed to release a maintenance patch to all game worlds again, this time including the new UI behind a feature flag (so the code is there, but it’s not enabled yet). This had some unintended side effects:
- A change completely unrelated to the new UI slowed the ORS in old game worlds down to a crawl. The bug was unintuitive, but after I found it, it was a quick fix (as it’s so often the case…). The respective change was done weeks ago…another reminder that I shouldn’t let patches sit on the bench for too long
- Even though the new UI isn’t visible in regular game worlds, the code is there and can interact with the rest of the system. In this case, it was causing some padding issues at the bottom of pages, because the new UI doesn’t have a footer anymore.
After this was taken care of, the strong feeling that I am seriously tired of UI work crept up on me 
While I wish I could just stop doing it, I obviously can’t: Firstly, the new page frame is of little use behind a feature flag and still requires some polish and adjustments. Secondly, the whole idea is to use the new gen-3 UI for new features going forward (the first one being a new search UI for the Distribution System). But before that can happen, the design of everything that’s not the header needs at least one round of design work to make the difference in visual language less jarring.
Be that as it may: I decided I needed a break, so on Friday I started to look into traffic imbalances between inbound and outbound bookings affecting ITRs. This is a nice backend-only project that will hopefully require no more than one or two weeks (famous last words 
) and might result in a seriously cool addition if it works out as intended. But more on that next week