Hexmap: Week 0x11

Big milestone this week as the the first two users (besides myself) signed into the production server and generated their maps. The first uncovered a little misconfiguration, that my error handling was fine for debugging but bad for UX, and some undocumented quirks of the Strava API. The next was a test of invites and Just Worked™ which feels like a huge success. It’s great to have some other humans thinking about what could be interesting for this as a product, too.

Also established the mapping cell keys (like 5x4-4vt-3wk), which was harder to port from the Placekey libraries than I expected. And a lot of little things: maps get reclaculated (technically: daily visit records are resampled) when upstream data changes such as an import is deleted, trailing slashes now get redirects on most URLs, form layout is a little nicer and extensible, the onboarding flow is more explicit, the admin user can su to another, sessions persist across restarts, error rendering simplified. Whew.

I’ve begun modifying my module tree for a posisble future where the various serving, processing, and data-healing services could be launched in separate containers. God help me if I ever need k8s to manage it all, but part of the project here is to think through scaling. A few distinct computing environments for tracking resource load would bring a lot of comfort. To that end, I also set up the basics with Grafana and Prometheus, but am only tracking at container-level today.