Zonkatonium

In the last three days, I’ve averaged 10 hours of billable time per day. That’s ten hours per day actually standing at my desk coding, perhaps 10-20% more than that “on the job”. I’ve been working on social and search aspects of the BayesHive web app: we have a pile of different kinds of items (data sets, documents, models, and some others) that are all searchable and shareable in slightly different ways, and this all needs to be managed in a sensible way.

After a frenzy of hacking, I merged the branch I’d been working on just before dinnertime. It all works pretty well, I think, although there are probably some holes. It’s pretty inefficient, but we’re planning to move to a different storage system for documents and data soon, and that will make full-text indexing much easier, streamlining all of this stuff, so I was happy to produce a clean design and not worry too much about optimisation for now.

I’ve been really enjoying this work. I think what we have now may be one of the more complex Haskell web apps out there, and we’re gradually converging on a design that looks really pretty nice. The combination of Haskell, Yesod and AngularJS is very effective, and there’s enough Haskell work to balance out the horror that is JavaScript.

Tom should be inviting some people to start playing with BayesHive some time in the next week or so. It will be good to get some other eyes on what we’re doing. I’m going to spend some of tomorrow trying to do some example analyses, but I’m too familiar with the foibles of the web app to be a really good tester.

The only question now is whether, after three glasses of wine, I’ll still wake up at dawn (about 5:30 here right now) tomorrow morning, as I’ve done for the last few days...