Hello and thanks for reading!
Today was supposed to mark a couple big advancements here at RateBeer -- 1) the merging of ticks and "personal notes" formerly "private reviews" and the correct rate counts around the site and in the profile, and 2) preliminary numbers for brewer scores. Because of the recent server issues, we aren't there and I am very sorry.
I started the week out well with 20 or so code fixes and many more customer support issues taken care of, a great start on brewer scores and personally tested merge scripts for ticks and personal notes. Wednesday things started to fall apart. We got some press and experiencing traffic surges outside the US but the technical issues seem to come at off-peak hours and suddenly unrelated to use.
I now have a small crew to troubleshoot and fix issues -- the way we serve pages is a lot more complicated than it was last year at this time and it was helpful to see we have monitors at multiple points so that we were able to isolate the problem to the database fairly quickly. Because we thought we'd be off the Microsoft software by now, we don't have anyone in house who is a wizard-level expert with it, so we're relying on issue support from Microsoft. They were usually pretty good in the past. I'd hear from them within 20 minutes usually and they'd fix our worst problems quickly and completely in a matter of hours. One person I spoke to before told me the issue is that Microsoft tech support for our time zone is based in Mexico City and Puerto Rico where both teams suffered recent natural disasters. Sometimes I forget that even very large companies are human after all.
So I'm doing all I can now to get the server better than stable and introduce new code that scales with our growth better. I'm working on that right after this (and before) actually. It looks like the new brewer page, and eventually search, will be great for most people but I want to be sure we take into consideration power users before I roll it out, so I may ask a couple of you to take a look at what I'm building on our QA machine. More on this later.
Beer Pics
If you have any beer pics for our Instagram account you can send them to me on the RateBeer or my personal Facebook page. I'd be happy to feature them with your user name and location if you include it.
Mobile App
A few people are starting to like the new mobile features and are updating their rating of the mobile app. This is good. I still understand the holdouts who are waiting for things like offline ratings. That's fine. We'll get there. The mobile team is doing some really good work and it's good to see the pace improving as well. Please continue to send us your feedback through the app. Every single feedback item means a lot to us.
Anything else? Please let me know. The rains have started here in Portland, Oregon. I love it and want to do some mushroom hunting soon.
Cheers, and have a great weekend!
