The rules were simple...

...or so we thought!

"Track at least one page or one percent of an audiobook every single day in January, starting on the 1st and ending on the 31st," the copy on the challenge page read.

"Please make sure you have the correct timezone set," we added.

Maybe the fact that we needed to add that warning, alongside instructions for what to do if you regularly did your reading before bed and tracked it the following day, was a sign that running this competition wouldn't be as smooth sailing and all fun and games as we thought. 👀

It wasn't long before the support tickets and Instagram and Twitter DMs started rolling in. 😅

They'd all start the same: "My progress bar isn't 100% full and it should be because I've been tracking every day."

And there'd be a multitude of reasons as to why that was the case, including time zones not being set correctly, tracking data (sometimes accidentally, sometimes purposefully) deleted, people making their updates seconds or minutes past midnight...

Irrespective of the fact that, based on the stipulated rules, there was almost always a legitimate reason for someone's progress bar not being at 100%, the whole thing didn't feel right.

It felt like we'd moved away from the essence of what the challenge was about. It wasn't fun. Our users weren't having a great experience. They weren't happy. And so we had to make changes.
 

The ability to backdate progress, combined with making sure that deleting data had zero impact on challenge progress, meant that we could now wholeheartedly enjoy the positive feedback from people around the world celebrating the fact that the January Pages Challenge had improved their start to the year and changed their habits for the better.

It took several hours to make these changes — and there was a little bit of stress involved since 10k people had a perfect record up until that point and we didn't want to mess things up for them — but it was worth it for sure!

Our users were happy again. 🥰 
 

 

The app can now comfortably handle thousands of concurrent users! Before the New Year, 400-600 live users was the norm, but now we rarely go below 1k. As to what our new limit is before we start having performance issues again — well, we'll have to wait for our next massive spike to find out... 😆
 

We're not done with our stability and performance work. We've got a list of changes we want to make to our architecture and infrastructure that'll hopefully mean that the app continues to perform well as we grow and that we're a lot more cost efficient while handling greater scale! Win win!

Oh, and the plan is still to launch our our end-of-year wrap-up feature for 2021 data. 👀 😁 

I first read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (and the sequel Bring Up the Bodies) in 2013. Now that The Mirror & the Light is finally out, I wanna refresh my memory! 

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. :-)
 

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