Summer break is upon us! This means two things:
- Going on vacation…which I am so ready for
- Trying to manage the remaining 4 weeks somehow during which school and kindergarten are closed
As such, week 31 was my last “undisturbed” week for a while. Week 32 will be a “wife has to work, both kids at home” type of week, so I’ll keep things going somehow (including a relaunch of Domination) but I don’t expect to get around to much else. And after that, I’ll be properly gone for around two weeks.
Consequently, I didn’t want to start any major new projects and instead focused on maintenance. I addressed a bunch of smaller issues around the DS/ITRs and the new UI, among other things, and rolled out the update to version 6.13.13 on Wednesday. This patch was supposed to cover a few more items than it eventually did, but the Smith incidence rained on my parade. At least I managed to deliver a long-overdue airport data patch the following day.
With that out of the way, I decided to tackle something even less glamorous: Our backend account management systems is lacking a few features that @molp and myself could use a lot, but that require manual fiddling with the database so far. In particular, it was surprisingly difficult to change an account’s username. So I finally decided to pick the respective ticket from the backlog and get it done. As I got into the flow, I might have gotten a bit over-ambitions and decided to also tackle automatic synchronisation with our forums. Because when you change a user’s display name, ideally you want that change to be reflected on the forums as well. This already happens, but only after a user logs into the forums, which in turn often doesn’t happen for a long time, either because they aren’t very active or because they already got a session. The result is that this requires yet another manual step after changing a display name. Obviously, there are other things that need synching as well…like added/removed roles, new access levels unlocked by a purchase and so on.
Long story short: I got started on this integration on Friday and put in several extra hours on Sunday to get it ready for release. Which I hope to squeeze in sometime in week 32.