Dear Lovely Simplerista,

Last night I spent battling some serious downtime on Simplero. In the end, it was something as banal as a full disk, but the reason that disk had started to fill up at an insane pace was a change I made to how we process some notifications we receive, to make the site faster and more responsive. Talk about unintended consequences!

Thankfully, I'm pretty far down the line of a significant upgrade to our infrastructure that would prevent at least this particular incident from happening again, and overall make our infrastructure more robust.

Oh, the joys of running a popular web service.

I've written up a detailed postmortem on the downtime—and as I was going to link to it, I just realized a bunch of the postmortems I'd written were never published. Oops.

In that situation, you're solving a puzzle. You need to know that you truly understand what happened, or you can't know for sure that you've fixed it. In this case, at first I thought it was a disk that had filled up. But that wasn't what really happened. What really happened was that change in how we process the notifications. There's just no substitute for getting to the root of the problem.

It's a good metaphor for my coaching as well. Coaching is like debugging, like solving a puzzle, but it's more of a full-body problem solving session. I need to listen with my heart, my intuition, my whole body.

I could probably have used a little bit more whole-body thinking last night as I was battling the downtime, but it can be pretty stressful in these situations. I remember one morning a couple of years ago where I was also racing to fix a downtime issue, and I finally decided to just go in the shower regardless. And once in the shower, it hit me what the problem was, and I could fix it immediately.

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New Features in Simplero

It's been infrastructure week at Simplero. I've moved the background processing jobs away from our main production server to two new servers dedicated to background processing.

I hope to be able to make THE BIG SWITCH before the weekend, so we'll have a brand spanking new server setup with full redundancy and a managed database with failover in multiple geographic regions. It'll give us a structure to grow from.

Can't wait to have this all sorted.

Random Links from around the Interwebs

The blockchain is a really exciting technology. Or, rather, the prospects of what it can do. Good write-up by The Economist.

Speaking of The Economist, they recently installed malware on people's computers (accidentally, but still).

Quartz on the parenting religion.

Time for me to get back to the business of building servers. Have a wonderful week!

Lots of love,
-Calvin