It’s been a long year for snailing. My simulation got a name, my snails got a brain, and a dev environment was deployed outside of my poor little MacBook Air that’s been chugging away like crazy with all the server and VM crap I’ve had to host on it.

After my last blog post I decided that it was time to deploy Gastropoda to Amazon Web Services - namely Elastic Beanstalk, which utilizes an EC2 instance (reserved) and an RDS DB instance.

Yesterday I put in claustrophobia for the snails. Jars have a capacity attribute - a maximum number of snails that they should hold. But just because a jar with a capacity of 20 may not be able to support 25 snails very well doesn’t mean the snails are going to conveniently stop reproducing or hatching (if it is a breeding jar). Instead, they’re just going to get uncomfortable enough to eat their babies.

I haven’t updated in a long time and it’s because the battle with snail brains has been raging on. Over the past few weeks I have run into several weird behavioural problems, including but not limited to:

Dear jar capacity validator,

I’m sorry I ever doubted you. I thought you were killing my snails, but really it’s my lack of you that caused the problem. I am the one guilty of virtual snailslaughter.