System Updates

January has been all about getting the changes held back over Christmas out to prod. There have been a lot of bug fixes but also optimisations, improvements and new features moved to beta.

In December we focussed on stability and speed, avoiding making any changes that did not directly improve this. The stability of the server over Christmas was as a result of this, so we have decided to devote a developer to this full time.

Work in November has been focused on server performance and stability. We have completed a gift card integration with vii, as well as the Hachette price and availability integration. There are some new things on beta that we would like you to try, but with Christmas on the horizon we won’t be pushing any large, non-urgent changes in December.

At this end of the year we spend time improving performance and the issue alert and recovery systems. We have also taken the time to get some smaller things done that don’t make the top of the priority list, but are nonetheless annoyances and easy to do. The big things we have been working on are a system to merge duplicated customers (in progress) and the box scan tool.

September has been spent pushing Accounts and Inwards Goods improvements to beta. As always, we would like you to test these changes for us to smooth out any problems and to properly prepare your staff. We have also added a green star to the Movers and PO Cart to help you make the most of Leading Edge deals.

This August we have focussed on improving the speed of the system and management of the load on our servers. We are developing a range of features that benefit secondhand booksellers; the first of these is a local image and we would appreciate shops testing it on beta for us. If you would like to suggest software changes that would assist secondhand sellers you are more than welcome to add to our work in progress document.

July has been focused on improvements and getting ready for some major system infrastructure upgrades. Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Google managed mysql and a load balancer. We are hoping to implement Google managed Mysql this weekend.

June has again been focused on optimisations, bug fixes and improvements plus the ongoing effort to get the Rails 4 upgrade over the line. Delaying R4 is to make sure that it can handle the load and that as many bugs as possible are out before we move everyone onto it. Thank you to the stores that have been beta testing the R4 version.

May was dedicated to improving the Agency and Distributor settings and the efficiency of setting up new stores, while we continue pushing towards upgrading the framework our application runs on from Rails 3 to Rails 4, which has proved to be quite the undertaking. The new Customer Order Interface is ready to look at and there is a video covering its features.

We are teetering on the edge of pushing the R4 upgrade and are trying to resolve all the issues before we do so. There comes a point when you have to push forward and we have named May 5th/6th as the day we will upgrade (unless a show stopper presents itself before then).