Kite status report 3

I haven’t written a status report for a long long time. I got stuck with a DNS bug which took a while to resolve and I got sidetracked by other projects. Things are getting better though: I’ve resolved this DNS bug and I’m halfway through adding multi-user support.

The DNS bug

DNS is complex, and my ISP having some pretty aggressive caching made solving this bug a lesson in patience. The problem was simple. I setup dogfood.kiteapp.io as a staging server and I wanted to receive emails addressed to it. Naïvely, I thought adding these lines to my DNS config would work:

dogfood.kiteapp.io. A XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
dogfood.kiteapp.io MX 10 dogfood.kiteapp.io.

If you’re not a DNS expert, you’ll probably think this setup is okay.

You’d be wrong.

Take a closer look. I forgot the final ‘.’ on the line specifying the mail server destination. This means I’ve defined an email server for the subdomain dogfood.kiteapp.io.kiteapp.io, in the process making all my emails addressed to dogfood.kiteapp.io go fill the great bucket in the sky.

So, this was a silly bug.

Multi-user support

I’ve started working on making Kite support multiple users. This involves refactoring the existing backend code to look in the right directories, handling authentification and adding multi-user support to the angular frontend.

At this point, I’m split between adding multi-user support and adding more features to the UI. I think I’m probably going to polish a little more the single-user experience before thinking of adding something else.

As always, send your comments, features requests and general inquiries at karim @ this domain name.