elz | This week in coding

archiveofourown.org has been updated! The most striking changes are the font (on Windows) and the browsing page for people, but there have been pretty large-scale changes to the underlying code. The testers did some epic work verifying that the whole site was functional. \o/

One thing that may strike some people as odd or counterintuitive is that we deployed the code with some known bugs that the testers and coders had noticed and in some cases had even fixed. The reason those fixes don't all find their way into the final deployment is that thoroughly testing the site takes a lot of time, and the more complex the code gets, the harder it is to guarantee that even small changes will work as expected under all possible conditions and won't have any unintended consequences. The goal in writing any kind of software is always to try to minimize unintended consequences, so that changing something here doesn't break something over there, but we are, alas, mere mortals, and the more you try to sneak in one last quick fix, the more likely you are to make sloppy mistakes. So we go with what we've got and we add those fixes in next time around.

That said, I did manage to fix a few bugs this week, which included an exciting eleventh hour realization that I'd locked admins out of the tag wrangling and translation pages. Oops? It took me about five minutes to change the code, and then an hour or so to run the automated tests and then try out the pages in question with all the possible user roles (logged out, logged in as non-translator, logged in as translator, logged in as translation admin, logged in as regular admin and then all again for tag wrangler roles). Then a tester had to do the same things to verify I hadn't missed anything. Fun and excitement!

So that was that: we deployed late last night, and then this morning, we had our weekly committee meeting and started talking about what comes next and what ongoing projects everyone is wrestling with. I'll be taking a look at the account creation process this week and making sure we're pointing people to all the things that need to be filled out and all the things they need to know right off the bat while minimizing confusion and annoyance as much as possible. Wish me luck! And no giant wasps.

This week in coding

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