Weekly review cw 05

NTSV table tennis website

After Maurice and I had invested two days in the new Kirby site, completing the work took a third day. In addition to the visual fine-tuning, the content had to be finalized. There are still a few areas to work on – but we don't classify any points as blockers.

Because we didn't use a finished design, the mobile views need to be corrected and optimized (yes, we started desktop-first). Some of the images will be replaced with more appealing versions. We are a little ashamed to let the stand go live. But this is precisely the right moment. Classic according to the Lean principle:

If you are not ashamed, you are going live too late

So be a little forgiving when you look at the site. Overall, we are delighted and have incorporated a few aesthetic gimmicks. Looking at the positive – maybe you will find them. It's best to look yourself: ntsv-tischtennis.de – it's a German only website.

Table tennis

I have already moved up to the 45-year-old group at the Hamburg senior individual championships. It was a laughable thought that it would be easier there. I enjoyed playing against the six-time and reigning Hamburg champion; it was a lesson in calm and well-placed play.

I was excited about the 3rd men's league games despite the defeats- precisely because of them. We are playing for promotion, aiming to beat our competitors and not allow ourselves to make any mistakes against the supposedly weaker players. As expected, the team was solid, and we secured second place.

I did not let the training intensity drop, so I used the days off from games to train. We had our NTSV internal system training with Philipp Floritz. On the school-free Friday, my son and I went to Bremen for individual training to prepare for the important league games in the evening. It's working!

To keep up with all of this, I've started running again. Currently, I'm running five kilometers two to three times a week. After 6 months without running, my body should slowly get used to the strain. So far, it's working well.

Project APEL

With all the sports and table tennis-related topics, work on our project hasn't been neglected. We're analyzing the technical infrastructure at a hosting provider in Brandenburg to understand how we can integrate ourselves into the existing systems cost-effectively. An infrastructure-as-code approach is complicated without the usual interfaces, as is familiar with the large hosting providers. This makes targeted analysis all the more critical to set up processes that are as (semi-)automated as possible.

At the same time, a focus was on server-side filtering and pagination of large data sets. We could connect the React component to our API without any problems. To display it correctly in the table, the total number of results from the configured filter is also required in addition to the data sets displayed. From a performance perspective, we would have mapped this query to a single database query. However, our ORM Prisma does not offer a solution for this case, so we must resort to a transaction with two queries. This is a suboptimal solution but acceptable for our load scenario. As usual in IT, weighing possible solutions is always essential. And the additional effort for a raw query does not justify the reduced load and readability.