Weeknotes 74

After drying in the sun, the AirPod that went through the washing machine is working fine.

Count me among the many others recommending Julia Evans’ “Get better at programming by learning how things work”.

C has developed a fondness for a large, solar-powered calculator. He calls it “Calky”.

My notes for this week’s notes are blank.

C’s left eyelid became inflamed. As it didn’t improve after 24 hours, I ran the gauntlet of trying to see a GP in person.

My quest started with an 8 am call to the local GP (“all appointments are gone already, you’ll need to go to a pharmacy”), then to a pharmacy (“we can’t prescribe anything for children under 2, you’ll need to see a GP”), to the GP in person (“call at 2 pm for an emergency appointment”), to a call with 111 (“see a GP within 12 hours”), a call with the GP (“a doctor will call you this afternoon”) and ended with an in-person appointment at 4 pm.

The GP was lovely even when C identified a robot in the consultation room (actually an ancient, giant pair of weighing scales) and repeatedly attempted to pick them up.

He was prescribed some eye-drops (the application of which is a twice-daily adventure in itself) but is recovering well.

I’ve been working on an integration with a SOAP API for the first time in years. I’m using Savon to implement a client in Ruby to consume a list of documents organised into a hierarchy of categories and subcategories.

I need to keep the documents and their categorisation synchronised with the API and have been experimenting with Which? Digital’s “Tree Delta” gem. If I can represent both copies of the document hierarchy as comparable trees of nodes, I can use the gem to produce the minimum set of operations to keep them in sync.

The tests for Tree Delta are wonderful, using Chris Patuzzo’s “ASCII Tree” gem to parse trees out of ASCII art, e.g.

AsciiTree.parse('
        (  a  )
        /     \
       b       c
      / \     / \
     d   e   f   g
')

Having spent a lot of time trying to make testing various SOAP API calls as easy as possible without having to use a large number of XML fixtures, this dedication to making tests easy to read is an inspiration.