#programming

Lately, there have been nothing but problems with the Morrowind Screenshots infrastructure, which has caused disruptions in the publication of posts. Sometimes GitHub stops seeing the screenshot repository, sometimes they stop being displayed on the site, sometimes dependencies don’t download, sometimes one social media platform goes down, sometimes another. You fix one thing, and another breaks.

The world is unstable, which is clearly reflected on the internet. Servers are increasingly losing sight of each other, and services are tightening up their APIs. And we have to somehow navigate through all of this.

Today, I seem to have reached a point where everything is working again all at once. For how long? Certainly not forever. But this is the way.

Until recently, the Morrowind Screenshots integration with VK worked like clockwork: posts were published quickly and with virtually no technical glitches. This was one of the most hassle-free integrations in the project—compared to other services where it is present, VK had a relatively straightforward API.

However, the company then suddenly decided to prohibit the use of the wall.post method for posting on walls via the API for almost everyone, except for a select group of large companies. And all they offered in return was RSS, which can be imported into a group at a specified frequency. Even setting aside the fact that this is not a replacement for a full-fledged API, this format works extremely poorly with images: the image in the post turns into a link to the website and is crudely cropped. It’s completely impossible to create a collection of images using this method. And I wouldn’t want every post in the community to look like just a link to the project’s website. In short, this format is completely unsuitable for a photo community, not to mention its other drawbacks.

I still can’t wrap my head around how you can prevent an author from publishing posts via the API in their own community.

Last year, I created the Morrowind Screenshots website and automated the posting of screenshots across the project’s channels. This allowed me to spend less time on its preparation and publication, and more time on the creative part. And it really helped to plan the release of posts in advance when I wasn’t online at the right time. Now these well-established systems are ceasing to function one after another. The site continues to update only once in ten times, despite efforts to fix the problem. Now Instagram and Telegram also periodically and unpredictably crash. So far, only VK has not failed. I continue to deal with the causes, and for now I do part of the work manually. Of course, this situation spoils the development plans a little, but in general, it is a great experience of how to support a project from so many related parts.

There is such a term in programming as legacy code. It’s when a piece of code is poorly written or outdated, but you still have to work with it and write just as bad code next to it, because rewriting everything takes too long. Today, having started to expand the old barn at the country house, I realized that the barn is crooked and the extension will also have to be crooked, otherwise it will not be possible to connect them together. So I learned what legacy is in the real world.

As it turned out, the first version of Photoshop was written mostly in Pascal: http://habrahabr.ru/company/ua-hosting/blog/266335/

@jetbrains Got some fun while starting PhpStorm on my desktop with Harry Potter film screenshot as background image :)

I wonder whether all Python programmers have seen Monty Python’s Flying Circus.