In Edinburgh! I’ve finally stopped spelling it as Edinborough!

  • Added ‘user group’ functionality to Quarry, and added a sudo user group that does what you would think it does. Will be assigned super, super sparingly.
  • Found out that I’d have to explicitly specify charset of the database when I’m creating it or MySQL will default to a stupid charset. Forced all tables and columns to utf8 and that seems to have fixed a bunch of unicode issues. Yay?
  • Still facing occasional MySQL server has gone away errors with SQLAlchemy for local MySQL instance, despite asking SQLAlchemy to recycle connections every hour or so. Reduced the recycle time to 10m, hopefully that helps.
  • Read Tony Hoare’s Turing Award speech from 1980, titled “The Emperor’s Old Clothes”. I think I should read more of these papers / speeches, helps keep perspective and ‘learn from history’. Lots of warnings against complexity seem to be a very common theme, and one I’ve also personally encountered many times. Recommend reading :)
  • More DMZ work! Now running edits per country stats separated by mobile vs desktop for all countries for all wikipedias! EXCITING!