Starting to fade

It's the conker tree again. The conkers are starting to become visible now and the leaves are starting to fade. This tree started to come into leaf about one month before a nearby sycamore, and it's starting to show signs of stress (it's been warm and dry here).

Tomorrow we go live live with my mark 2 of the code for our big client. It's been running fine in pre-production for a month, but they haven't tested it nearly as much as I would like. We've also learnt that it's going to be more of a technical go-live with the current businesses upgrading from mark 1 to mark 2, but the new business we built this code for won't actually go live for at least a fortnight.

Back blip.

A month later tree is gradually getting less green but the conkers are forming well and August has been nice rather than scorching and we've had some rain so the tree is probably a lot happier.

The mark 2 code release went without incident and I was very pleased with the upgraded code. It has several extra features, but I've also removed things we didn't need any more and so was able to remove several hundred lines of code which is always good. I also radically changed the design. The original core was a single pass design - it looped over the data once doing everything in one go - which is simple. The new design is a two pass design, which is a bit more complex, but allows me to do a lot more data validation on the first pass, and makes the second (main) pass much simpler. The result is a far more robust solution. It took a while but the second business unit eventually started to use the code - which is good and it's been okay from our side.