Hey everyone. No major news or announcement today. I just want to fill you in on where things stand.

The dark ritual

I've finished building out a full IT infrastructure. I now have primary servers that host the sites and content, and standby servers that copy over the site's live data. That gives me a live replica, so I don't lose data. If a primary goes down for some reason, a standby becomes the new primary. The switch takes about 5 minutes, and almost no data is lost. I wrote about this here the-incident.

Those live replicas also let me move the site halfway around the world without you noticing a thing. I now have a proper zero-downtime setup. Of course, if something breaks I still have to step in. A standby doesn't become primary on its own. But that really does only take minutes.

On top of that, I built a multi-purpose monitoring service. Its main job is to make sure replication and file sync don't break, and if they do, I get a Telegram alert. It also keeps an eye on the database and the Linux servers themselves. If something gets maxed out (disk filling up, CPU under heavy load, memory about to run out), I get a Telegram alert for that too. There are around 20 of these checks, so I can catch problems early.

I'll probably come back to infrastructure work again. There's always something to improve somewhere. But the main work is done.

Linux

As I mentioned in this post Bots, Linux, and a Fursona, I've been running Linux only for over half a year now. And you could say I've turned into a real Linux gigachad. I've learned to use a ton of command-line tools and programs. I run fish as my shell and kitty as a GPU-accelerated terminal, with custom hotkeys, settings, and themes. tmux on the servers runs custom configs and UI tweaks too.

For most of you this probably doesn't mean much, but in IT terms you could say I've joined the techno-aristocracy. I don't think I'm done growing, though. There's still a lot left for me to learn.

What I'm working on now

Before things went wrong a month ago, I was working on a really interesting feature, and this week I got back to it. Like I said before, I'll do a separate, bigger announcement where I'll explain everything in detail.

The main reason I'm doing it: 95% of the site's users are on their phones, not a computer.

My best guess is it'll be ready pretty soon, sometime in July. And honestly, I'm kinda fucking worn out. I could use a short break.