Teaching an old computer about new stress

This week we only pushed a single release - though we’re aiming for one later today. Our release cadence has reduced but the speed we’re moving at hasn’t. Rohan, Dave and I have been working together pair programming our way through refactoring the EQAI coach that recommends runs. We’ve been making good progress and whilst none of it is yet visible to anyone using Byrd a lot of work has been pushed to the app ready for next week. Meanwhile Ellis and Polly are working on Season 1 so that we can keep growing our digital world around our running. Nina’s busy working with everyone currently using the product - and those that aren’t - about how to make it even better for everyone.

I’m going to keep this week’s update reasonably short to jump back into getting these changes ready to be released. I’m pretty ridiculously excited about how big an improvement it will be.

Stressful bugs

As always there were a few bugs to squash this week.

Black screen of doom

When Byrd communicates with the server it has to encode and decode the data being sent (it’s called serialization). Computers are stupid and need to know explicitly how they’re supposed to encode and decode things. Unfortunately we missed a field that the machine needed to be told about when we added the ability to add your mood to your run. That caused a black screen of doom, which will persist irrespective of what you do as a user (because the data is on the server). The good news is it will automatically fix itself as soon as you upgrade to 0.4.1 and we have a new item on our deployment checklist to run through!

Garmin workouts not reflecting changes to difficulty

We added the ability to chill out (or harden) a run that Byrd had recommended. Unfortunately what was being pushed through to our watches was the old version of the workout. It sounds like everyone spotted the problem before heading out for their run. It’s fixed now!

Back-to-back runs are gone

‘Back-to-backs’ are great runs to do if you’re training for an ultra. When I was training for an 80km I had a number of runs that were 6 hours over two days, which I’d naively believed would be my finish time over the distance. That said they’re useful within a very narrow context of running, which Byrd currently isn’t doing a good enough job to support. We’ve removed them for the moment but will aim to get them back in as soon as the generator work is complete.

And with that I’ll jump back into getting the EQAI Coach up to the standard we want. Happy running and catch up next week.