The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #202
An update on our database migration, a conference in Philadelphia, lagging behind on redesign work, and an upcoming workation in Paris.
Maintenance Update
I’m very pleased with myself and Rob. We took our learnings from the postmortem of our last scheduled maintenance period and applied them to this recent one.
One of the main takeaways was to communicate a downtime period that was at least double our estimate.
Well, we kinda did that. The trial runs had us at 14 hours.
…
28 hours seemed a tad too much…so…
…24 hours. 😅
And lo and behold….
The downtime took 22.5 hours! 😅
Imagine if we’d said 15 hours…!! 😭
Admittedly, once we had communicated “up to 24 hours” we added in some extra steps for safety and scale, but we still didn’t expect the whole thing to take that long.
Luckily, to most of our users, it looked like we came back early. 😎
And, while we had a few configuration hiccups after the main event (including one right now as I type this 😅), the app is faster already, and this is despite still having a lot of performance work to do!
In West Philadelphia…
I was in Philadelphia last week for the final RailsConf. Rails is the platform I use to build StoryGraph and I keynoted the conference last year (in Detroit), detailing my journey from zero to two-million users (we’re now at four million!) as a one-woman dev team.
This year I was on a panel talking about the past, present, and future of Rails. I was able to talk about how the tools being developed now allow me to maintain three codebases — web, iOS, and Android — all by myself!
I also realised that being in Philadelphia meant that I had to recreate one of my most-viewed dance videos ever:
I had asked over on StoryGraph’s Instagram what the best bookstores in the city were. I could only make it out to one and enjoyed browsing and reading in Uncle Bobbie’s. (If anybody wants the full list of recs, email me and I can send them to you.)
Between the conference, catching up with industry friends new and old, and getting ready for the dance shoot, I did shockingly little dev work. Where does the time go?! 😭
Hey ho. On to this week! 💪🏾
By next issue…
I hope to be reporting significant progress in the redesign work and that we’ve ironed out any remaining niggles with the database infrastructure migration.
Next week I’ll be doing a four-day workation in Paris before heading to a wedding just outside of the city! ✨
If you have any recommendations for places to work from, places to sit, sip coffee, and read in, bookstores to check out, or great lunch spots, please send them my way! Where are the best croissants and where are the best macarons, eh? 🇫🇷
What I'm reading
True Crime Story by Joseph Knox is fun. A fictionalised true crime story and author, presented as nonfiction? Here for it! 👏🏾
Have a great week,
Nadia