📒 Week 47 #weeknotes

Quite uneventful week. Pretty much spent working on the ongoing project of syncing Bluesky replies to Leaflet comments

Deployments were causing multiple stability issues in the to Unison Cloud due to continuous Storage calls to fetch the current authentication parameters. I worked with the Unison Cloud team to debug the same.

I first made some design changes to memoise the Storage calls with a TTL, as recommended by the Unison team. However, that did not work out as expected for my use case.

I made further changes to look for access token freshness only when it mattered, just before making the POST request to create the comment.

Also, there were multiple zombie daemons lurking in the Unison cloud, which I worked with the Unison cloud team to get rid of. That enabled me to have new deployments.

Even though I am experiencing continuous hiccups in deploying this simple project, I am immensely enjoying being a very early Unison Cloud user. I am trying to use the cool cloud libraries, such as Volturno and Arcella, extensively. Also, practically working and debugging a distributed systems program is very interesting.

Unison Cloud, with its innovative programming model and cloud strategies, is absolutely revolutionary when it comes to conjuring a fully distributed cloud application - no YAML files, no cloud dashboard/UI stuff, no one-off scripts in a different language like Python or Bash, and most importantly, no semantic or syntactic context switching. Everything in Unison, all low-level stuff taken care of by the language & cloud framework, and provides the necessary knobs to us programmers, the familiar and boring functions.

Ashes started, and I really liked the fast bowling extravaganza. I only watch Test cricket, the purest form of cricket as it should be. And watching superb fast bowling in Australian pitches reminds me of those yesteryears of McGrath and Brett Lee. India's tryst with SA in the 2nd Test is ongoing, but I have little hope, as most of the Indian players in the Test team right now have the patience of a 2-year-old when it comes to playing genuine Test cricket.