Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Most of today's work was driving around and running errands. Not how I generally like to spend my days but not a bad day for it at least.

Emailed the food bank today to let them know they can pick up the stuff from my shop today. Our annual New Year's weekend fundraiser got the food donation box completely full, we wrote a $700 check, and there's whatever customers put in the cash donation box (don't know how much that is, but it's not nothing).

Today's web site updates include lowering the price of our Guatemalan coffee (supplier error in our favor and me passing the savings along) and changing pretty much everything on the tea list (3 package sizes got bigger, 1 package size got smaller, most of them got more expensive, but quite a few went down in price).

This is one of those feature areas that's really been kind of stagnant even among competing programs over the past couple decades. I think other devs just haven't been putting any thought into how something that on the surface seems obvious and boring could be a lot better.

Work continues on porting over a feature from one of my dead end prototypes to the current code base. The 1.x code presented less information in more space and I've really enjoyed using the reorganization of a bunch of related features in that prototype so it's something that I definitely want to keep going forward.

I kind of wish the most recent espresso grinder had another digit or two on its shot counter. It's overflowed its 4 digits at least a couple times now in the past 4-5 months.

Detoured to another small feature that I suspected I'd be able to slam out quickly while I wait on other stuff. It needs a little more work, but today's work solves what I consider the biggest blocking issue to getting the new version released and I know my staff will appreciate the change once I get that deployed for them and tell them about it.

Finished up enough of the code I've been writing lately to meaningfully test that. Needed to fix 1 assert failure (iterating over the wrong list) and missing breaks in a switch (really not sure how that happened) but otherwise that chunk of code worked fine and I can move on to the next thing.

The update does not include a new award that some listing site invented to try to trick people into thinking they're relevant.

First web site update of the year is done. It's just removing the notices that we're closed on Christmas and New Year's, removing the promotion for a charity fundraiser that ended yesterday, and changing the copyright year. I'll need a couple more soon to share the amount raised and lower at least one price.

Related, if the "Skip Verification" button is only going to show a "no, you can't skip verification" error, maybe don't present the option in the first place?

Can whoever keeps doing the email verification code thing test that against a greylisting mail server and not set things to time out before such a recipient receives your code? (Also maybe make sure that retries get sent from the same outgoing mail server so that people don't have to wait for the 4th code before getting one that can possibly work.)

Found the root of the issue. Still weird that it was only affecting one data series, but I'm pretty confident that this is fully fixed now.

Finally got a good read on the problematic state triggering the bug I was working on yesterday and it was not quite what I expected. It is still a complete mystery to me how the problem was only manifesting on a single channel so I may want to dig into that a little more, but there's a fast and easy check that prevents the issue from spreading into the rest of the program so I'll take that as a win for now and keep exercising the new code to make sure there's nothing else I'm missing.

I'm almost certain I know what the problem really is now, but I'd like to see the full details of the failure before working out what the fix needs to be.