19th June 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I came across a crazy problem with our system this week, which was creating problems with locating tutors and students. Basically what we do is take a postcode and convert it into a grid reference. We then use that grid reference to calculate the distances between addresses so that we can offer tutors opportunities close to them. However, the piece of code which was supposed to retrieve the grid reference wasn’t working, and even worse than that, the error message informing us of the problem had been disabled. Luckily it didn’t take more than a few hours to fix, but it’s frustrating to know that there will have been a few students recently for whom we haven’t been looking for a tutor.
This is actually part of a wider problem. Our website, and the system behind it which does all the heavy lifting, has been worked on by a number of people who have all done things in their own way, and the result is a lack of coherence in the way things work. I am a little OCD about things like this, and my temptation is to take a month out and just rewrite everything to make it better, because all I do at the moment is paper over the cracks when something needs updating. I think I’m right not to do that though, there are much more important jobs to tackle over the next few months.
Oh, and I should say that if you’re a tutor or a student reading this, don’t worry about the website being unsecure or likely to fail all the time! I’ve probably made it sound like that, but just haven’t gone into specifics because that would bore even me. The specific problem this week was actually created by our server stopping a function from running to improve security.