Last week, I made progress with the graceful shutdown, namely stopping accepting new connections, managing a channel between the main task and forwarding tasks to tell them to finish their work and exit, and eventually timing out if tasks still don’t finish on time.
However, it was a bit more complicated than I expected. A key thing I realized that is also true about this project more broadly is that there are many aspects that are difficult or impossible to use manually or with a quick script since this project would normally be one part of a much larger system. Although I would be using automated testing anyway, this just makes testing all the more important and central to being able to say that a feature is implemented.
Accordingly, this week I will need to test the graceful shutdown logic in order to use it and confirm that it actually works as intended (in addition to getting all of the other regular benefits of testing). This will be more involved than testing pure parsing functions or something like that because of the concurrent tasks and timeouts and such. I will also need to slightly refactor to make this aspect more testable.
I was significantly impeded last week and will continue to be significantly impeded for the next few days due to preparations for an internship interview I have Monday night. This is my first interview in Japanese, so I’ve been solidifying my knowledge of the kind of language that is appropriate for interviews (since it differs from everyday conversation a lot more than in English). Beyond the fact of interviewing in a second language, just preparing in terms of the content itself has also been a major point I will continue to need to spend a lot of time on. Although I will also be pushing as much other work as possible to after the interview, there will at least be a couple of days between the interview and next Thursday for me to put in the time for this project.
I would say that my process was pretty much dominated by the unpredictable amount of time and effort required by my job search. I feel like I’ve been getting too focused to the point of expending time and energy inefficiently. At the same time, I think what I’m trying to achieve calls for that type of approach to some degree. I think the best way to improve upon that is finding a balance between tempering perfectionism and accepting the reality that some degree of perfectionism does achieve concrete results.