Monthly update for July 2020

Mostly internal tools improvements

Hi there!

This is the 34th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. Hope you are doing well and staying safe!

Product updates

1, A bunch of API improvements, notably a) Podcaster API and b) Playlist API. If you run a podcast hosting service, welcome to integrate with our Podcaster API.

2, Improvements on automation tools to fix broken podcast meta data. And improved the podcast submission review tool. 10x productivity for sure :)

Typically, companies need to invest a lot of resources to build and maintain internal tools (from retool blog post):

In other words, many engineers in tech companies are building tools for their coworkers to use, not for end users outside the company — some may say this kind of work is boring. You can estimate how much money a company needs to spend here: hourly rate X work hours X percentage…

3, Dramatic performance improvements on some slow webpages. It’s actually very simple: adding CACHE. The code change was tiny. But it takes time to enumerate & test a bunch of edge cases, because of cache invalidation.

4, Built a script to one-button-push to generate a dev db dump, which includes a small subset of podcast db & excludes all real user info. Just set up dev environment on a computer. This script comes in handy. Always invest in productivity.

5, Migrated the status page from status.listennotes.com to listennotesstatus.com. We had ~20 minutes downtime this month, because of Cloudflare outage. For obvious reasons, we have to host the status page on a separate domain.

6, Handled a few very tricky edge cases for payments (api & premium membership).

Company updates

In one podcast interview, Andrew Wilkinson said he likes “New Zealand-like companies”. Why? New Zealand is in the middle of nowhere, often overlooked, safe from nuclear war, self-sufficient and thriving.

Actually Listen Notes is pretty close to be a “New Zealand-like company” by this point :) Default alive for sure.

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Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!