It has been a while! SnailLife work has been moving at a snail’s pace. Why? Because debugging the snail brain has turned into a highly demotivating, hellish endeavour. The snails make decisions and perform actions based on so much crap, that the simple log files I was using all long are just not cutting it anymore. The Laravel log for the original app has turned into 3 Laravel logs because I now have 3 independent apps (the front-end, BrainRunner, and BrainHub to coordinate all the brain runners). That then turned into individual log files per snail plus individual log files per brain task. And still making sense of why snails are choosing to behave in certain ways is nigh impossible - the brain and infrastructure issues I have been facing have been seemingly neverending.

I’ve recently discovered Safari Books Online thanks to a post on HackerNews. One of the first things that caught my eye was one of the Oriole Online Tutorials - Hello, TensorFlow. It was a very quick overview of TensorFlow in a really cool format. There was a video with an accompanying article (which can autoscroll along with the video contents) and code snippets embedded on the page which you can actually work with and run in the browser.

@Lazer Having a fish tank is supposed to be about stress relief.

— Steven D Marlow (@sd_marlow) August 4, 2016

Zhora the fairground goldfish

I had a goldfish as a kid in elementary school in Alabama, obtained for free when I won it at a school fair. My family and I knew nothing about proper care of any fish - poor Zhora spent two years in a small round bowl with no filter and no heater, us not knowing any better than to change the water every week and feed him flakes daily. We actually thought he had a good life. Only years later when I happend to look into having an aquarium again did I realize how wrong we were and how miserable Zhora must have been. Here is what I (as a complete noob) think is a good overview of why it’s bad to give or receive “free goldfish” at fairgrounds.

I finally have two BrainRunners working on a DigitalOcean droplet, and one BrainHub on another droplet queueing and assigning tasks to the runners.

I’ve started this post maybe twenty times now, since before Christmas, and each time I keep putting it off, thinking “I’ll just blog when I have this next bit done.” But each “next bit” is followed by something else, and then something else, into infinity.