|
Getting my a** kicked by payment system
Sorry for the late update. For the past few months life had been a series of working till 6am, struggling to get before 11, and stomp on the keyboard for another 15 hours. For many days I thought "Oh I'll write my journal after work", and I ended up sleeping on the couch.
We've been putting a lot of time on the Gaia mobile app, but because we are using a new framework and programming language, progress had been slower than we wanted, and so far we have had the registration flow, main landing page, avatar dress up, item opening, and forum features ready. There are still many other features to work on, but at least we have a base for testing.
A good amount of my time is also spent on maintenance. Gaia today is a system with 22 thousand files and countless lines of code. Maintaining all existing features had been a difficult task as many little problems pops up here and there. I try to catch what I can find on bug report forum and ATS every week, but often other nasty problems just show up unannounced and absolutely put my productivity to an end.
One of such issues is our Paypal payment gateway. We initially implemented this gateway back in 2009, and Paypal had depreciated this old version since 2017. One day the Paypal servers decided to go down for 6 hours, and that was a signal telling us that it's time to upgrade. Though the payment gateway is just part of an integrated system that communicates with the coupon system (bonus item, bonus GC and payment discount), the global discount system, payment tier system, internal reporting system and data validation checks.
What was going to be a 2 day project quickly ballooned into 7 days worth of debugging, testing and bug fixing. One moment I though everything is fixed, out comes a different payment reporting pattern that is undocumented by Paypal and I needed to not only fix the problem, but retroactively grant GC and rewards for any failed transactions.
After a final pull on error reports and bug fixes, the payment system is finally stable. Hope I can get a full night sleep after this. Oh but first I better get my taxes done.
Since tax day is my birthday, delaying my taxes almost feel like an attempt to delay my aging. biggrin I felt like time is at a stand still when I put my head down to work, and I've been leaving many personal goals behind. Work had always been my baby but it's gotten to the point where I seriously need to have a family of my own. I've been living with my fiancé for more than 10 years now, and we're planning to close the knot next year. And if we're lucky, we might have somebody other than Waffles to demand our attention. We still haven't chosen a theme for our wedding yet, what do you think it should be?
PS - I spent a couple of hours setting up the Jabber server for zOMG, but the security settings still need some work. I might need to find an older version of the server at the end.
|
