Breaking Radio Silence

I’ve been off the air for quite a while. Everything converged at once: the final week of vacation, when you’re urgently trying to catch up on everything you’d been putting off; the first week back at work, when everything is on fire and there’s no time for anything; plus the May holidays and the opening of dacha season, which contributed their share. I was mostly busy cutting down maples. But the project kept moving — I was pushing it forward in the gaps between everything else.

Yesterday I finally finished building the infrastructure for the new network architecture and ran a full end-to-end test. First traffic flowed from client to internet through the entire chain of new components — start to finish. Hurray, comrades!

The architecture turned out to be fairly complex — along the way I had to change some decisions on the fly. I tried to keep track of everything, but I can’t hold all the details in my head at once right now. So the next step is to walk through the entire scheme again — from beginning to end — and get the picture settled in my mind. I’ll also work on the documentation: it currently exists as a first draft and needs to be reviewed and brought in line with how things actually turned out.

I learned so much that’s new and interesting during this time that it won’t fit in a single post. Soon I’ll be launching a series on the key differences between the old and new architecture: what changed, why it was needed, and what it gains us.

I’ve also accumulated a few items from the personal track — tangentially related to the project: a couple of stories about building my personal brand on Habr, and first experiments with Go. But those will be separate posts.

I’ll be back.