#19 - Preflight Check
Hey friends,
This week was a little crazy. To make sense of it, one could describe this week as preflight checklist.
According to Wikipedia:
In aviation, a preflight checklist is a list of tasks that should be performed by pilots and aircrew prior to takeoff. Its purpose is to improve flight safety by ensuring that no important tasks are forgotten.
This quote effectively summarizes what happened with Feather this week. We conducted a small preflight check to get an indication of whether or not Feather will fly (pun not unintended 🙃).
Our check started unexpectedly on Thursday morning when we saw a thread was blowing up on HackerNews. The thread asked, "What's your quarantine side project?" I got pretty excited when I saw this because we had previously identified HackerNews readers as potential ideal users for Feather.
So I took a couple minutes to fix some typos in the Feather docs (I'm sure there are still many more), deployed the update, and then submitted a small comment on the thread.
Now to be honest, I was not expecting much to come of the comment. Feather's website was (and still is) rather cheaply thrown together, and our comment was only one of some 1200+ comments on the thread at the time.
But then... after about 10 minutes, I started to get a strange feeling. I wanted to know what others would be seeing if they happened to click on our link. So I went to our website and tried to create a new account. I couldn't! The site just hung as I clicked "Sign in". 😱 For a website which claims to offer "sign-in as a service", this was ironically horrifying.
I rushed (clicked really fast) to our AWS dashboard to see what was up. It took a couple minutes, but I eventually noticed the site was hanging because our database was hitting its "max-database-connections" limit. Wuuuuut....
Long-story short, it turns out two things were happening:
We were getting far more traffic than we had anticipated. 📈
We were not cleaning up our database connections properly. 📉🙈
It took us a little while to correct these bugs, but we were eventually able to get the fix out. Unfortunately, we were only able to start accepting sign-ups after missing much of the early morning traffic.
However despite the bugs, the day ended up in a far better place than it began! Our database showed 350+ unique visitors over the course of the day, but we suspect the actual number was a bit higher. While the bug was live, most visitors didn't get counted in this metric. We also received 28 upvotes on our comment, and it stayed on the post's first page for most of the day. Finally, we were able to salvage 15 legitimate sign-ups. This lead us to get in contact with 2 of those people which has resulted in some really great conversations and feedback.
So after our preflight check, it's clear Feather still isn't flight-ready yet, but we're feeling much more confident about what needs to be done to get it there.
Changelog
This week was wild. In addition to our Feather soft launch (it feels great to talk to users and get some supportive comments), we grew the Summer of Shipping mailing list to 300 members! There's now a team of students working with Phil to grow the project.
Phil finally set up some automation to send emails and add people to the calendar invite via Zapier! It’s truly the backbone of no-code tools - IFTTT on steroids.
Misc
😕 We were incredibly sad to hear about the layoffs at Uber earlier this week. To our former colleges (and to all who have found themselves unemployed as a result of the pandemic), we offer our deepest sympathies. Not too long ago, Phil reflected on his experience with layoffs. In difficult times, sharing stories is a touch of consolation.
That’s all for this week.
Stay safe!
Nick