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 :)
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!