Status update, January 2021
Published on February 04, 2021
Table of contents
I spent the first half of the month deep in Cyberscore’s codebase. I also started working on a couple of consulting gigs.
Cyberscore
Last month I started rewriting the pages that seem more problematic, either code- or layout-wise. This month I split the user settings page from the user profile page, changed both of their layouts to remove all those scrollbars, and added proper navigation instead of relying on navigationless AJAX page loads.
I also started tackling some issues from our tracker. One thing led to another, and ended up rewriting some pages related to game rules. Game rules are things like: “Only one controller is permitted”, or “No glitches allowed”. This system was initially designed to only support one rule text per game level, and when it was expanded to allow for multiple rule texts not every page was updated to match that.
A random bot found an SQL injection attack which brought the website down for a few minutes, so I had to spend some time tracking it down and fixing the vulnerability.
I also did some long due system upgrades. The MySQL server package was in an
un-upgradeable state, because the debian-sys-maint user had been dropped when
the database was first imported. This was preventing us from upgrading our
packages, so it was important to get that fixed.
I wrote a blog post on some php/mysql things I found interesting while working on all of this. I wish I could migrate this to either mariadb or, ideally, postgres, but this project has some queries that rely on weird behavior and it doesn’t use any database abstraction layer, so that’s probably going to take a while to happen.
Random consulting gig 1
The first job, which is probably 90% done, required working on an integration with Token, an open-banking platform. Their docs are, frankly, quite bad, so I kind of had to jump through some hoops to figure out what was going on.
Random consulting gig 2
The second gig consists of figuring out how to bring upgradeability to ink! smart contracts. This was submitted as an application for the Web3 Foundation Open Grants Program, so let’s see if it moves forward.
I was reading through Substrate’s documentation and submitted a few small fixes:
If the proposal is approved, expect a blogpost or two on this topic while I figure things out.