Updating Metrics App for Couch Changes
Most of my day was spent struggling with the 'metrics' app - a simple web app that we use to present the metrics for all the runs we do. Now that we're running all of North America, the next most important issues to solve are adding a few columns to some CSV exports from this web app. But as I soon found out, this was far more involved than adding a column or two.
The reason they needed to be added was just additional information for the users investigating the data to spot problems. But what I soon found was that the changes we had made to how we wrote data to Couch - as four separate documents as opposed to one document and three (server-side) updates to that document, had a far greater impact than we knew. Most clearly evident in that a lot of the reports simply didn't work.
So I needed to go back and check every function on the page. Thankfully, most of the ties were to the javascript or backing ruby service code, but it was still a lot of work as there wasn't a ton of documentation on it, and I had to bop back and forth to the Couch web viewer to see what I had available to me to build with.
But the real kicker was when we needed to relate one document, the output of one process doesn't have any way to relate it's output to that of another. The best we've got is the loose relationship of time: one process starts pretty soon after the other.
So I had to add quite a few views, and complicate the logic in order to get what we needed from what we were given, and the timing relationship between the phases. It's not ideal, but it seems to work, and for all the crud I had to go through, it should work.
I'm glad it's over.