This week I've been in New York City with the rest of the divmod developers, trying to get our product
(service, really) into an acceptable state to start selling it to
people.
Aside from some
really unfortunate personal issues, this has been easily the best week
of the last year. Every day I sat down to do some work, every day I got
something quantifiable done. There are design issues, but there was no
thrashing between completely different ways of doing things, only subtle
corrections of possible problems.
Even the one really frightening thing that happened this week, a DB_RUNRECOVERY
error which spuriously appeared when we attempted to open our database file,
turned out to be a peculiarity in the interface of bsddb and not a systematic problem. JP and I managed to get the
database re-opened and uncorrupt just by reading the mnet source code and
tweaking some variables.
The two stars of this week were really "atop" (atomic transactional object
persistence), and "nevow" (pronounced "nouveau", the next version of woven).
After a week of intense work, we have a new UI and a new database: the new
UI is almost to the point where the old one was, and the new database is far
beyond the point where the old one was.
Despite this, there's a huge amount of work remaining, especially to rewrite
our input handling and such. Still, I estimate at this point that I'll be
keeping my email in this system in 2 weeks or less, and I'm far more sure of
that estimate than I have been at any point in the past.