2011-03-03

PSF core grant, the last days: the website works (so far)!

The last couple of days I have been working hard to hack together (and I mean hack; it is not the most elegant code or solution I have ever written) the remaining bits of the website. I am currently waiting for the task queues to finish doing their thing so that I have a complete data set before I go "public" by asking the community for some help with something. But so far things are working out and hopefully I will wake up in the morning to no errors and the data set complete!

The biggest challenge I have run into over the last couple of days is App Engine's 10K limit on task queue data. that ain't much data. So I had to do some reworking of my data syncing workflow to use the datastore as a temporary storage solution. It worked out, but I'm sure I am doing something silly. At least I made sure everything happens in a transaction so that if anything fails the task queue will simply try again until it works (hopefully it's a transient failure and doesn't require me to fix some code  =) .