Monthly update for September 2021

4-year anniversary!

Hi there!

This is the 48th full month (4 YEARS!!) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. Hope you are doing well and staying safe!

What’s new?

1, A standalone login page: listennotes.com/login

It took us FOUR YEARS to build this standalone login page. It was just one of many tasks that sit in our TODO list forever :)

Previously, login/signup happens in a popup modal, which is NOT linkable. We were not able to share a link when replying to customer support emails.

2, Major infrastructure upgrades

We upgraded several critical pieces of infrastructure software, including:

• Ubuntu 18.04 → 20.04

• Django 3.04 → 3.27

• Postgres 11 → 13

A lot of prep work. Rehearsed the whole upgrade process on staging 4 times within 5 days. Each took 4 hours, end to end.

On a quiet Friday night, we did it on production. We had to disable database writes for ~45 seconds, while doing pg_upgrade. Other than that, things went well.

Also, did some database performance tuning, e.g., tweaked configs & added a bunch of indexes.

3, “People also like…”

For some popular podcasts, we added a “people also like…” card, under the COMMUNITY tab of the podcast page (Example):

4, Sponsored Daring Fireball

This was the second time we sponsored Daring Fireball. Basically it was to promote this blog post: Why Podcasts Are My New Wikipedia —the  Perfect Informal Learning Resource

If you are curious, this was the ad on Daring Fireball :)

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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!