A couple of weeks ago I had the genius idea to rewrite SnailLife in Go. I’ve already looked into doing this once before a couple of years ago, but wasn’t really feeling it and stuck with PHP (mostly for nostaligia reasons). Now though, SnailLife is this bloated PHP app. Most of the core functionality is in. After weeks of battling infrastructure issues, when everything was back up and running again, I took a step back and saw how big the app (or rather the 3 apps now) had become. At the same time I’d been reading in passing about Go and became curious, so I figured - why not look into learning Go by rewriting SnailLife? Not because I think Go itself will necessarily make anything better, but because a rewrite might.

I went to a really interesting talk at Foo Cafe in Stockholm tonight. I stayed almost 2 hours over my time limit, but it was so worth it. The talk was by Martin Neumann, and he gave us an introduction to big data and some tools commonly used to wrangle it. Below are the notes I took throughot the talk. I cleaned them up a tiny bit, but mostly these are just for my personal benefit and are super messy - if you didn’t attend the talk they may not be that useful.

I went to a really interesting talk at Foo Cafe in Stockholm tonight. I stayed almost 2 hours over my time limit, but it was so worth it. The talk was by Martin Neumann, and he gave us an introduction to big data and some tools commonly used to wrangle it. Below are the notes I took throughot the talk. I cleaned them up a tiny bit, but mostly these are just for my personal benefit and are super messy - if you didn’t attend the talk they may not be that useful.

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.

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.