Imagine what it would be like to have the website that you lovingly coded into existence go dark. I experienced this unfortunate circumstance last week, and I liken it to a less intense version of losing a child temporarily in public. First concern, then panic, then a period of insanity where absolutely nothing else matters but finding your baby, then the relief of reunion, and finally a slight bit of embarrassment about how you acted and that the child was lost in the first place. Suffice it to say it is not a good feeling, especially when the site has been featured as a start-up on Built-in Chicago and those precious click-throughs are getting wasted....never to come back. Very sad indeed.
I first learned there was a problem on the evening of Thursday, Feb 16th. I was presenting my site to the user-experience class at Code Academy for feedback, and when 6 or 7 people logged in at the same time, the site started running very slowly and started throwing off all kinds of errors and delay. Not good!
A quick sidebar about my experience at Code Academy UX: I took away some great quotes: "think about how you can make things simpler", "do one thing REALLY well", "get rid of the login requirement", and many other specific suggestions. THANK YOU to the UX class at Academy for your awesome feedback on my site. Some of your suggestions are already in place, and more to come.
So, after the UX class I went to work trying to figure out the problem. I spun up some extra bandwidth through my hosting service and that seemed to help.
Fast-forward to the next morning. I met with another usability person to review my website...and the site was not coming up at all!! NOOOOOO! Meeting over, all appointments cancelled, straight to my laptop to try and find the problem and solve it.
Then I discovered the first major problem: I did not know what the problem was, and I had no way to monitor performance and see what was going on behind the scenes. I worked feverishly trying to diagnose the issue: researching, installing software, monitoring, recoding, retrying, all to no avail. I made some tracks in that I finally discovered that I had huge memory leaks, but I had no idea how to fix them.
Earlier in the day, when I first saw that my site was down, one of the co-founders of Code Academy had a suggestion: write about your problem and see if one of the Code Academy mentors will help. He obviously saw the panic in my eyes and took pity on me. He gave me the green light to email the mentor listserv. Late on Friday I sent the email....a plea for help.
The response from the CA mentors was amazing.... Several mentors emailed potential fixes, asked questions, and came back with more advice on how to fix the problem. One mentor even got into my code and found a major coding error on my home page that was causing the blackout. Within a few hours the site was back up, and now it operates much more efficiently thanks to advice received from the CA mentors.
I think the CA mentor response is indicative of the Ruby community in Chicago. The culture is collaborative, probably in some part due the fact that the Ruby language is open-source, as is the popular Rails framework. No one is going to do your coding for you, but if its demonstrated that you've really tried to solve a problem, it seems like Ruby programmers in Chicago are willing to spend time to help . There are Ruby meet-up groups all over Chicagoland that are meant for collaboration, and that makes a huge difference for beginners like me. A sincere THANK YOU goes out to the CA mentors for their input and willingness to spend time helping a beginner ruby programmer. Who knows how long it would have taken me to fix without your help!
So that is how parenthood is like tech entrepreneurship. We all nurture our babies, get scared when they are lost even temporarily, and we all hope that one day our childen will grow up and be able to support us when we need it.
Tom Brown
CEO, and Acting CTO
@livebytransit
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