June Update
StoryTime's new drafts feature is live and we've fixed a server slowdown issue; coming up: UI tweaks!
Hey there! Nat Bennett here, with your monthly update from StoryTime, a backlog management tool for XP teams.
Big news! Drafts is finally here! It mostly works!
Now when you create a new story it will appear in that column on the right and you’ll have to drag it over to the left to prioritize it.
This has immediately produced a hunger in our PM and Designer for moar stacks, though as you can see there’s a lot of detail work we need to do first. I catch a lot of problems in my own testing of the system but Jesse always finds a few more.
On Mysterious Slowness
The other big thing this month is that I just fixed an issue where typing a long description would cause the server to (appear to) crash.
What was actually happening was that our load balancer was closing the web socket connection. The load balancer was closing the web socket because the web socket appeared to be idle. The web socket appeared to be idle because the live view was getting busy processing a single event for a long time, essentially because it was doing Database Things every time it got an update message from the client, and it was getting an update message from the client on essentially every keystroke, because here at StoryTime, Your Keystrokes Are Important To Us.
We fixed it by moving all database operations outside the live view event handler. Now everything database-y happens in an asynchronous task or a GenServer that serves as a buffer for those updates, so we store all of your changes to stories in memory more-or-less immediately, but we only write to the database every half second or so.
Next Month
Jesse and I are visiting family for most of July so it may be a slightly lighter month than usual.
The main things on our agenda for the month are
Fixing a bunch of small UI problems
Re-designing the story cards
That’s all I’ve got for you for now.
See you in a few weeks!