A while back, a customer reported that something was off when searching in our application. When searching for “Akilleshäl” (Swedish word for “Achilles heel”, which is a query I just made up) they only got a result for “Akilleshäl 1” and not “Akilleshäl 2”. Weird!
I started to look into it and noticed that both results were returned when searching for the part of the word leading up to the very non-English letter of “ä”, but once that letter was added, the second result disappeared.
I recently published my first blog post in almost four years. It turned out to be a less than straight forward journey, so I thought I’d share the adventures I experienced while venturing into the rabbit hole.
Search for credentials to the server where the only copy of my blog existed. Found them well hidden in an old 1Password vault.
Clone the Git repo of my blog from that server.
Write a blog post. This did not take as long as the rest of these steps.
New is always better, I often say, half-jokingly. There’s a heart of truth to it. I enjoy unboxing a new phone or, most recently, getting our first brand new car at the dealership. There’s a satisfaction in the exploration of newness and, hopefully, an element of happy surprise.
New is always better used to be less of a joke. Perhaps it’s because there are fewer surprises these days. That third camera in your iPhone? It’s obviously not as exciting as when your phone got its first camera. Or perhaps it’s because I’m older. Jaded, even?
My main project at work has been developing an authentication plugin implementing the SAML2 protocol. For the last three months I’ve also been developing a web-based issue tracking system, with the goal of unifying our internal workflow as well as improve communication on user reported issues with our customers. In my last post, The Mythical Man-Month, I quoted the following sentence which resonated with my experience from these (and previous) projects.