New Daily Parker release

Despite fighting with Microsoft Azure Table Storage over whether the dev/test environment's tables support reading and writing (they haven't since 11:18 am today), I was able to release a new version of the Inner Drive Journal, the engine that The Daily Parker runs on.

The most important change from my point of view is that it now uses Polly for significantly increased resilience accessing the Cosmos database where all the blog entries are stored. This should prevent cascading errors that I've had to deal with from time to time when some rude search bot tries to read every post I've ever written but just winds up overloading the database. I also made a few architectural corrections that reduce the number of database and Azure Tables hits per view, and fixed a blocking problem that tried to do them one after the other instead of all at once. (That's actually faster in modern software because it doesn't wait for one thing to finish before starting another through a different channel.)

The most important change from your point of view is that it now supports my reading list. If you go to the Calendar, you can see what I've read over the past year. That may not sound exciting, but it's actually a major step towards what the Inner Drive Journal is supposed to be. The next step will be to store and search all kinds of data that currently lives in Excel sheets and Access databases. The result will be something truly cool, that can support multiple projects and data types, and allow for fine-grained permissions and sharing.

Also, it only took me two days for the basic implementation and then one more day of fine-tuning to make the book list available. All the performance and security improvements took another two days. Without Claude Sonnet 4.6, having to hand-roll each line of code and all the tests, this would have taken me a month. So I anticipate more rapid development over the next couple of weeks, and realizing what I wanted this application to be when I first sketched it out 15 years ago.