[Changelog] May 20th, 2022

Last week was a real blockbuster in terms of front-facing UI & product changes. This week was primarily the backend, which makes it a bit less of an exciting update.

Here goes (it might sound like jargon...):

• Reduced the number of fields being pulled in for the curator subscription in an attempt to minimize server load
• This one actually took almost 2 days to figure out. Ideally I'd like to get rid of this subscription altogether, but a lot of reactive data is needed on the front-end. In the end I settled for reducing the load a bit...
• Built a redundant fallback service endpoint
• There are a number of servers doing "background tasks" and heavy functions so that the production, client-facing servers don't get too bogged down
• Historically, I'd pick one server to handle a task and move on from there. But if that server went down, there was no redundancy
• A frequent example is the "curator earnings" function which takes place on a separate server that occasionally goes down, which means curators don't see their up-to-date earnings
• This new redundant function makes it easy for me to fall back to a second server if the first one fails
• It also means I can offload a bunch of other heavy tasks, which I'll continue doing over the next week
• Fixed a few bugs
• Dynamic genres not reflecting nicely for a curator when they visit their own profile in the curators feed
• Sanitize story comments so people can't inject random HTML
• Fixed a few bugs related to stats for SubmitHub Links
• A brand new way of loading translations when someone visits the website that uses direct database lookups instead of a reactive tracker
• Got my car serviced and I had the electricians over to hook up a fan to a light switch. Also took a lot of naps because I've had a cold all week :(