2011-03-30
Hey everyone. A lot of people have been asking me about rstat.us lately, so I figured I’d tell a little bit of the story as it’s gone down so far.
First, here’s some numbers:
Here’s some fun info: stats on statuses by language:
Lines, by committer:
Also, wilkie has a lot more code in the 3 gems that we build off of, for our ostatus implementation.
That makes for 29 unique committers. These stats were generated by git-blame.
Just over 200 pull requests
872 commits
Crazy! Such good stuff. I’m really excited as to how it’s going, but there were a few rocky points along the way as well. Some people saw me tweeting in frustration with Heroku, so here’s the skinny:
On Sunday, for some reason, our 3 line app.js file, as well as our favicon.ico, started to take 60 seconds to respond. This meant that a dyno was getting tied up, and since Heroku changed the way their mesh works, they kept routing requests to these screwed up dynos. This caused a rash of 500 errors, and I frantically filed a support ticket. This was the first time I’d had a paid app on Heroku, and they’ve always been fantastic. The Hackety Hack site was on the free account, and performed beautifully, with similar traffic.
What it boils down to is this, though: Heroku took about 22 hours to respond to my support ticket, in any way. Not like “we’re looking at it, but it’s Sunday, so it’ll take a while.” Crickets. Meanwhile, the errors kept happening. Eventually, I heard something from them, where they pretty much said ‘I see other errors, try fixing those.’ with no response on the actual root cause. I got an email from a Level2 person who promised to investigate and escalate, but by now, I still haven’t heard.
I also had a smaller issue with MongoHQ. To their credit, I heard back Sunday night, and the issue with them was an annoyance, not a showstopper. I ended up hearing from the CEO, who ended up following up with me multiple times, and in a pretty timely fashion.
So, we moved our hosting away from Heroku and onto Duostack. Now, full disclosure: I’m friends with the guys from DuoStack. That said, they took care of me. I found a small bug in their platform when deploying the app, but everything’s gone really well. Bunches of users have commented on how fast the site is now, and I’ve been really happy with it so far. We’ll see how it goes.
Anyway, here’s what’s next for rstat.us: The biggest thing is getting to 100% ostatus compliance. We spent lots of time this week getting screwed over by a bug in Google’s hub implementation, but now that it’s all taken care of now. While we work on that, we’re also getting ready to deploy a statusnet compliant API, so people can use statusnet clients on mobile and desktop. This is huge for me, as I’m really missing notifications.
Other than that, just keep using it! Tell your friends! If you code, come join us on the IRC (#rstatus on freenode), and help file bugs and patch them!