The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #180
Hello from Buttondown, the launch of supporter subscriptions, more disappointing downtime, and a West Coast US trip! ☀️
Hello Buttondown
This is a little bit scary! Since I started my newsletter on June 10th 2019, I’ve been using Mailchimp.
Back then the newsletter had 100 subscribers. Now, just over five years later, my mailing list is almost 5k strong! 🤩
For a little while, I’ve been thinking it was time for a change and finally, in the last week, Justin Duke, the Founder and CEO of Buttondown has helped me to move over as part of the concierge onboarding service they offer! 🙌🏾
(Oh, I know a thing or two about concierge onboarding… 😅)
So, here we are! Hopefully this email goes out to all of you okay and there are no problems. I’m still figuring out my way around with it but hopefully after I’ve sent out a few issues I’ll feel right at home.
Supporter Subscriptions
One of the reasons I wanted to move to a new email platform was so that I could set up a way for anybody to support my work and my writing!
If you enjoy reading this newsletter and want to support me, please consider taking out a monthly “Pay-What-You-Want” Supporter Subscription (min $5/month) to The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries.
This newsletter will always be free but I’m considering starting a private Discord and/or providing some other content to my paid supporters, starting early 2025.
If you take out a subscription and have any ideas/preferences for extra content/community spaces, let me know!
Disappointing Downtime (Part II)
The week before last we finally did our big migration to distributed database architecture!
After our experience in January, something that I wanted to make sure we handled correctly was the comms with our user base. I cut new versions of the apps with an improved ‘maintenance mode’ flow, spun up a new status page, sent out a product update email, and made posts on social media. I was feeling good!
I’d done a lot of work to get the app ready for the switchover, but on the day there wasn’t really anything for me to do. Rob would be managing the whole thing.
So once we got going, I mainly just sat back and waited.
And waited…
And waited…
And well…as is wont to happen with these things, they didn’t go quite to plan…
Take some inaccurate time estimates, failing commands, network issues, and an initial configuration that couldn’t withstand our regular traffic, and six hours turned into twenty… 😅
Last week, the team held a postmortem on the migration and we left the session with an action plan for how we can prevent such a fiasco from happening again, including a new approach to testing, benchmarking, and customer updates.
But, with this new architecture, not only are we hoping to finally have a January 1st where the app doesn’t crash under the increased traffic, we’re sincerely hoping that we won’t ever need to have prolonged downtime again. 👀
There’s still some issues left over from the migration that need to be handled before we feel fully settled with our new infrastructure and that’s a priority for me this week!
California Dreamin’
I’ve been on the West Coast of the US for just over a week now, mainly staying with Rob and Saron, but I’ve also gone all around visiting other friends and it’s been glorious!
After the reading challenges redesign trial, we decided to continue working with the new designer. Her name is Yeji Seo and she’s a student at the University of Southern California. So, on a recent trip to LA, Rob and I arranged to meet her!
After that, I surprised Rob with an activity: a pirate-themed escape room!
It was my first ever escape room. We had a great time and eventually made it out! 💪🏾
What I'm reading
On the flight over I started Asako Yuzuki’s Butter. I’d picked it up on a whim after seeing the cover in a bookstore in Edinburgh a few weeks ago and then skimming the beginning of the blurb. So far so good, but it's still early days!
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. :-)