#102 - When Search Disappeared

It was looking like a regular Friday.

I'd just done my morning work stint and was heading out to the gym.

For some reason, I decided to do a final check of our project management tool.

In the prior 20 minutes, a handful of search errors had been automatically logged by the bug tracking software we use.

"Maybe there was a minor service interruption with our search sever, but everything is fine now. Let me just do a quick search on the site before I head out to confirm there's nothing to worry about," I thought to myself....
 

A couple of "these books are definitely on The StoryGraph" searches later and I knew that something was up!

Logging into our search server, we could see our cluster was being reported as 'unhealthy' and no amount of restarting or rebooting would bring it back up. 😩

This was incredibly worrying. Search is needed for so many aspects of the product, beyond a user trying to find a book: Goodreads imports, searching for an author or publisher while adding or editing book entries, finding your friends in the Community section, browsing reading challenges, and more.

So much for the gym! 😅

So what had happened? The hardware that our search system ran on just...died.

To make it clear: the hardware failure happened at a provider of our provider. Two software companies removed from us! That's tech for you!

Even though our provider was eventually able to restore our cluster from a recent backup, Rob and I took this as an opportunity to migrate to (what we hoped would be) a better service!
 

It took about 15 hours for us to be up and running fully once again.

Some users have reported that search has been faster ever since.

We'll take it. 😌
 

 

We also added in a little something extra for Plus users!

Now they can see tables of their average rating per mood, genre, and book type! 🤓

We'll mainly be focusing on Android app updates, a new version of our similar users algorithm, and some maintenance work.

Based on user feedback, our proposed idea of "groups" has morphed into "buddy reads" and so we'll be figuring out what V1 of that looks like.

And, not only is Abbie's 2-year anniversary of working for us coming up, I'm having a milestone birthday and will definitely be continuing my tradition of doing no work on that day. 😌
 

I'm re-reading The Secret Lives of Church Ladies in anticipation of my Instagram Live interview with the author, Deesha Philyaw, on the 19th of this month.

I'm also running a book club discussion group for it, which is going really well so far!

DM me on Instagram if you'd like to get involved.

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)
 

Haven't tried The StoryGraph yet? Check it out today!
Love the app? Consider upgrading to our Plus plan!
Want to volunteer? Apply to be a Librarian!

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