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):

Learn more: How to create a podcast clip for free?

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

• https://www.listennotes.com/ar/

• https://www.listennotes.com/fa/

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!