My posting has been a little sporadic over the last few months, mainly due to a big work project that is now due for completion. The project was an update/rewrite to a spam reporting and collection database that is used by the Australian Government, both updating the application, and moving the whole thing to the cloud.
We are rolling out the new system over the next month, but for now it is substantially completed (in that it has passed all the user acceptance testing).
For those with a technical interest, the system is written in
python using the
Django web framework. (There is a chess link here btw, as the late Malcolm Tredinnick was a significant contributor to Django). The backend database is
Postgresql, with
Elasticsearch for text searching, as well as javascript,css and html for the front end stuff. All of these tools are open source btw
It was developed in house, 37% under budget, exceeded the initial specification, and is designed to handle an average of 300,000 spam filled emails a day.
I hope I have't risked fate by blowing my trumpet too loudly or too early, but if everything goes according to plan, the work/chess balance may be heading back into chess's favour.