Week 927

Hello! I’m currently sheltering at home from the wind and rain that Storm Austen is bringing.

We’ve had another busy couple of weeks working on Mavis. We’ve been:

• Fixing hard-to-debug configuration problems with our Sentry integration that meant we were omitting some context from some of the events we were sending.

• Improving some of the flakey end-to-end tests mentioned in week-925.

• Continuing to work on tooling to automatically generate a report of our rspec tests, also mentioned in week-925.

• Attacking the problem of automatically hiding sensitive information stored in the app irrespective of how that information is rendered.

• Adding Grafana dashboards.

• Investigating the cause of some of the noisier exceptions in Sentry.

• Surprised that using ActiveRecord::SessionStore with its JSON serialiser and backed by a PostgreSQL JSONB data column stores the data as a string of JSON rather than as JSON (the serializer has to be set to :null to get it to work as I expected).

While not working on Mavis we’ve been:

• Having quite a few different business development discussions. Thanks to Chris in particularly for leading on these.

• Continuing to explore migrating away from 1Password. James and Chris have been trialling Bitwarden and it seems to be ticking the boxes so far.

• Discussing how/whether to grow GFR in light of some of the possible business opportunities. I think we’re all keen on the idea but it’s always felt like quite a daunting prospect and never the right time. Maybe this time will be different…

Until next time.

– Chris