May 2019

Hi there!

This is the 20th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. Same as last month: No any visible improvements for the website. It's mostly backend / infrastructure work.

You can read past issues of this monthly update.

Product updates

1. Tons of infrastructure improvements: upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 for all servers (from 16.04), upgraded to Elasticsearch 7.1 (from 6.5), upgraded to Postgres 11 (from 9.5)... In particular, upgrading Postgres was the most time consuming task, which took me a few days to complete, as I had to make sure there was no downtime for both the website & the api.

2. More follow-up developments for Listen API v2: standardized API documentation with OpenAPI, added RunKit integration to the DOCS page, bigger thumbnail images for podcasts...

3. Some internal tools to fight spammers. Yes, there are a lot of bad people on the internet trying to create fake accounts on popular websites, e.g., for black hat SEO purpose.

Company updates

Well, I planed to work on some website features in May, but I ended up doing mostly infrastructure work to keep up with the growth on the API side -- there are still more infra work to do in June.

Blog posts

• Some API improvements

• The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (Updated)

Some numbers

• Database: 699k podcasts; 46.2 million episodes

• Website: 1.3M page views & 545k unique visitors in May

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