This week I built a daemon.

I don’t like the term “daemon”. It feels like an unnecessarily arsey way of saying “background process”, particularly when talking to non-programmer-y colleagues. But I do like grand, concise ledes for my weeknotes.

This background process forms a key part of our infrastructure for the integration we’re building. In orchestration terms, I’ve built a conductor to decide what to play and why, and my colleagues are crafting a body of musicians who can do all the hard work of playing. Two halves of the same puzzle.

Part of the background process involved implementing a feature flag, so we can turn it on and off on-demand. I’ve hopefully done this in a reusable way, so we can quickly and confidently add more feature flags in the future.

We’ve made a few more iterations with email this week too, which feels very agile and iterative. It’s nice that we’re now comfortable enough with the service to “just do” things rather than having to understand components first. And tests are continuing apace to make us feel more confident there too.

Summary

• Built and deployed a background service to upload documents on report submission (eventually)
• Created our first feature flag
• Updated the design of the admin panel
• Did a bit of gap analysis on out-of-date contact details we hold for deputies
• Introduced better, formalised healthchecks to our services
• Increased startup time by building the service caches on build rather than deploy
• Started fixing a bunch of PHPStan errors in the API
• Regained access to the UCL VPN and reoriented LSGNT status across environments