Friday, 17 February 2006
Sucking Transparently 
This week wasn't great for Simpy - some lame ___ (see below) caused errors to appear in the UI, and people couldn't get to their links for several hours (ok, maybe it was more than just a few hours, yes, yes).
Judging from the number of emails I got, a lot of people regularly use Simpy. Of course, I know that because of various Simpy usage reports I run periodically. What I didn't know, however, was how many dedicated users Simpy has! (read: how stuffed my Inbox was when I woke up one morning) It takes time, will, and interest to write an email and say even something as short as "hey, your stuff's kaput". Even if you use the negative tone. It's an investment, and I appreciate it! What pleased me even more was that I received so few negative emails! I got only one email where a person "threatened" to go to a sit.ethats.hard.towri.te when I failed to respond the same day. I'm not blaming the person - I'm surprised I got only one such email.
"So what happened?", people asked. "Can you blog about it?" "Growing pains?" ...
While Simpy has grown a lot in recent months, this wasn't about growing pains. I'm afraid it's nothing very exciting. It's got 3 letters, starts with a 'b' and ends with a 'g'. One of the resources that is used for computation of "Related Users" (if you are saying "huh?" now, look at the right side of this for example (scroll down if you have to)) got messed up, and caused the errors to bubble up and display Simpy's error page instead of users' links. I kicked Simpy... where it hurts...a lot, and needless to say, Simpy quickly got its (his?) act together. The problem has also been fixed, should the mentioned resource get in a funky state again.
There you have it. Sucking transparently, the 2.0 way, by the book. Sorry for hiding your links temporarily!
