Improving Performance & Squashing Bugs

As discussed in the last issue, my current 4-week block of work is focused on maintenance and Operation: Stay On Postgres.

The biggest problem we have when it comes to our highest traffic days — I’m looking at you, January 1st 👀 — is the load on our primary database.

Rob realised that a huge chunk of our issues would be solved if we could keep the primary database out of the picture for the most common cases where a user updates something and then immediately views it in the app (marking a book as read, leaving a review, etc.).

We designed and implemented targeted caching strategies for those actions and well, let's just say that we're feeling a lot more confident about staying on Postgres for the long term now:

I’ve also spent several hours working on long-term fixes for our most prevalent bugs:

Hoping that I can get to Inbox Zero here by the end of this week. 🤞🏾

Standing & Coding

Remember when I asked for standing desk recommendations at the end of last year?

Well I’ve finally got one and let’s just say that StoryGraph coding sessions have levelled up. 😎

My Top Ten & Julie’s Top 5

I’m loving this Top Ten segment of the paid version of my newsletter:

It just feels so fun and alive, ya know? 🤪

Without this segment, I wouldn’t have realised that five(!!) books had been knocked out of a top ten spot in the couple of weeks since the first bonus newsletter (available for free to everyone).

Last week, I went to a live edition of the music show Julie’s Top 5.

The night’s theme was Black British Anthems, and the five panellists had to share their opinion of what they thought the all-time top five Black British anthems were before, with audience participation, a single top five ranking was unanimously agreed upon.

I love the general concept of the show and it’s inspired me to maybe do something similar for books.

My reading community and I would settle on a theme/category, relevant nominations would then come in, generating a longlist, a vote would generate a shortlist (maybe of 8-10 books), and then anybody who wanted to could read the entire shortlist and, similar to Julie’s event, a final panel (Ideally live? On something like YouTube?) would finalise the top five.

The themes could be something like The Novels of Margaret Atwood, Standalone Fantasy 2025 Debuts, or Narrative Nonfiction Books Published Before 2000.

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What do you think? Would you like to get involved? What length of time should this be run across? 3 months? 6 months? Using what platforms? StoryGraph (for buddy reads?) and YouTube (for live streams?)?

Your Jeff Bezos & “My Jeff Bezos”

This post reshare brought me a lot of joy last week:

Gay & Straight

Looks like I’ve gone viral…

…for absolutely nothing to do with work or fitness. 😆

Kieram was even recognised in the street on the day the video hit 1 million views! 😂

What I’m Reading

Almost halfway through my nonfiction fave’s latest book and it’s fantastic. 🥹

If you’ve read it, please don’t share your opinion on it with me until next week. Thank you! 🙏🏾

Have a great week,

Nadia