Updates for November and December 2021

Jan 03, 2022

Hi there!

Happy new year!

This is the 51st full month (4 YEARS and 3 month) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) Be able to download actual video and audio clips (Example):

2) Better UI for right to left languages, e.g.,

3) It’s a good time to do some infrastructure upgrades during holidays:

Upgraded to Python 3.10 (from 3.8)
Upgraded to Django 4.0 (from 3.2)
Upgraded most pip packages to the latest versions, except for paypal-checkout-serversdk. I created a GitHub issue.
Upgraded to Elasticsearch 7.15 (from 7.6)
Upgraded to Tailwind 3.0 (from 2.2.x)
Upgraded a bunch of EC2 instances to more powerful instance types (again).

Luckily, no drama, thanks to extensive testings on staging & gradual rollout.

Why we should do infra (both hardware & software) upgrades periodically (e.g., annually)?

Security patches (obviously…)
Bug fixes (obviously…)
New features (e.g., Tailwind 3.0 adds RTL support)
“'End of life” - if a piece of software is not longer maintained & updated, it’ll decay (aka, software rot).
Performance improvement (e.g., new EC2 instance types, Python 3.10 is fast…)
Making it easy for future upgrades (e.g., it’s easier to upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1, than from 2.1 to 3.1)

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!