Growing joys (and pains)

The number of active Spin Rewriter users keeps growing every single month without fail — which of course makes us extremely happy. 😃

But it's not all peaches and cream. 😅

It just so happens that growing joys can sometimes also bring some growing pains with them.

Everyone that has ever run a large-scale software-as-a-service (SaaS) business will tell you that it's a lot of hard work keeping all those servers running without a glitch. Keeping terabytes of data that's usually spread across multiple giant databases in tip-top shape. Making sure that things don't suddenly come crashing down, or — at the very least — slow down to a crawl.

It's a battle our tech team has been fighting for close to 12 years now — and luckily they're pretty darn good at it! 😎

Their job is somewhat unusual in one specific regard: If they're doing good work, our users will never know they even exist in the first place. But as soon as things start to go wrong (Spin Rewriter slows down or crashes for some users), everyone's suddenly pointing their fingers at them. It can be a truly thankless job.

So I am beyond grateful for the work they do. They are amazing at it and they keep delivering absolutely outstanding results. So — thank you! 🙏

Just this past week our team seriously optimized the twice-a-day maintenance tasks that run on our massive databases. It was a lot of challenging technical work to speed up those database queries and make all that maintenance happen in a "non-blocking way" (so that our users can keep spinning their articles while the database is being updated in the background), but they succeeded.

And as a result, Spin Rewriter now works even more reliably than before — and it's even faster for everyone. Hooray! 🤩