Happy November!

Thank you to everyone who’s been giving me feedback about your experiences (and the occasional bug report…)

My Q4 OKRs focus on three main areas:

• Building the organic growth flywheel.

• Building the daily use flywheel

• Operational stability and headroom

I have a couple of pieces of the first two running privately, and I hope to be able to release them soon. (Ideally, by Thanksgiving, depending on how everything else works out.) I don’t like to pre-announce — (it’s just me, and sometimes life happens…) — but I hope you’ll find the upgrades useful.

The operational side is moving along well. The general throughput of the crawler/classifier and personalization engines have grown by 2 and 4 orders of magnitude respectively in the past quarter. I think I can get another couple of quarters out of the existing infrastructure, but we’ll have to see how growth goes over the next few weeks. Elixir and Erlang are pretty good at scaling horizontally, but that just means the bottleneck moves elsewhere. (Often, the database. Occasionally — unexpectedly — Redis.)

One thing I do have to do this month is upgrade Postgresql to version 12. Besides being a good thing to do, this should allow me to squeeze a little extra performance out of the existing hardware. There might be a day or two of downtime as I’m managing this transition, but I hope to keep it to a couple of hours.

That’s all for now. Please let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for reading.