2024-09-11 17:15:59 -07:00
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layout: post
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title: "State of DTI: 2024"
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2024-09-20 13:25:20 -07:00
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date: 2024-09-20 13:15:00 -0700
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2024-09-11 17:15:59 -07:00
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author: Matchu
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2024-09-11 17:32:53 -07:00
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excerpt: |
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2024-09-20 13:59:55 -07:00
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<p>After 15 years of DTI, and 15 years of changing
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circumstances, <strong>our primary focus is keeping DTI around for the
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long-haul</strong>—through stability, simplicity, and sustainability.</p>
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2024-09-11 17:15:59 -07:00
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---
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Hi, everyone! Hough, this post is a long time coming but I have not had the
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power of Words—but today I do, and so we write!
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2024-09-11 17:26:35 -07:00
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First off, thank you for being so kind and helpful as you always are! Idk if
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y'all know that like, the community does the majority of the work for DTI? We're
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just doing our best to keep the lil guy chuggin' along underneath you! And thank
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you always for your kind words, too 🥺 It helps a lot.
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2024-09-11 17:15:59 -07:00
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After 15 years of DTI (what the heck??!), and 15 years of changing
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circumstances, **our primary focus is keeping DTI around for the long-haul**.
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2024-09-11 17:26:35 -07:00
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And, I'll be real with ya, the choices I made in earlier times weren't really
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2024-09-20 13:53:10 -07:00
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designed for decades of operation 😅 (DTI I think is now officially older than I
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was when I started it? 🤐)
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2024-09-11 17:15:59 -07:00
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2024-09-20 13:53:10 -07:00
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- Back at the start, I wasn't really uhh, good at working with others? So I
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never put together a formal team, and I built a codebase that was difficult to
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share.
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- And when we rebooted as Impress 2020, I borrowed the technology and design
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intuition I'd gained in _professional_ software—not realizing that's a level
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of complexity designed for teams of _fifty_ to keep up with.
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But now, here we are, with _two_ apps instead of one, and just me as the
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operational bottleneck—and my _own_ life focus has shifted more toward my
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personal household, with not even enough volunteer time to even do the work to
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_hand over the keys_ 😖
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So, today, DTI development is mostly a time management game. That's why I've
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been focusing on long-term choices I hope will change this in the years to come!
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The themes are **stability, simplicity, and sustainability**.
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2024-09-11 17:15:59 -07:00
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_I also want to call out and thank TNT in particular for their help with
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sustainability!! The NeoPass partnership has been a genuine game changer—I'll
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talk about it more below!_
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### Stability: Changes to keep the site running
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At the start of the year, DTI was… uhhh, often broken 😖 We'd have multiple days
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of downtime, and I'll be real with ya: it was _mostly_ an awareness and time
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management problem.
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Issues generally got resolved within hours or minutes of my sitting down to
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_fix_ them, but… my world was large, and there were a lot of messes to clean
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beyond just DTI 😭 So, I didn't discover issues quickly; and when I _did_, it
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would sometimes take a few hours, or even days, to become available.
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When I was younger, it was easier to be on-call all the time… now, we have to be
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smarter about it. So, hey—we're being smarter!
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- **🔔 Alerts:** We've set up automated notifications to tell us when the site
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goes down, or when a new kind of crash appears. _(If you're curious, we're
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self-hosting [GlitchTip](https://glitchtip.com/)!)_
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- **⚙️ Auto-monitoring:** For crashes that _kept_ happening, we configured our
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machine to intervene. _(Like, if the site's RAM usage gets high, we now
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auto-restart it.)_
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- **🧑💻 Simplifying:** Reducing the complexity in our whole dang architecture has
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been huge for stability, too. _(We'll talk about it more below!)_
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With these changes, it's been months since our last like, _major_ downtime
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event. We're still not as consistent as I'd like to be, but hey—more to come!
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### Simplicity: Cleaning house, clearing hallways
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The high-level goal here is: **I want to remove Impress 2020, but only once we
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no longer need it**.
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Right now, Dress to Impress is a weird combination of apps… I copy-pasted some
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of Impress 2020's best UI changes over, but it all still used the Impress 2020
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_server_ code, even when you're on `impress.openneo.net`.
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2024-09-20 13:53:10 -07:00
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This both doubled the danger of downtime (if _either_ server goes down, that's a
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problem for both!), and added networking complexities that are hard to track
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down (hello, "error loading species/color"!)
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Like, it's just not a great situation for stability, _or_ for removing me as a
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bottleneck. There's too much happening; and too much to know that, right now,
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only I know! 😬
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So, here's some of the changes we've been making:
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- **➡️ Porting features:** We finally brought Impress 2020's improved
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Offering/Seeking trade listings page into the main app!
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- **🌸 Simpler rewrites:** We reimplemented the item page preview in Rails and
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plain HTML/CSS/JS, instead of being a fragile, frankenstein-y React component
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using Impress 2020 behind the scenes.
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- **⚡️ Rewiring the wardrobe:** The main outfit editor still has a _couple_ API
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calls to Impress 2020, but very few! And we're exploring the possibility of
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other ways to simplify that page, too.
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- **🧹 Ancient code cleanups:** As I wander the halls of the very old codebase,
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I occasionally stumble into something unused, or confusing, or way more
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complicated than it needs to be. And so I clean up, so my future roommates can
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be comfy here!
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A lot of it is invisible work, toward the goal of _destroying_ things rather
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than building them. And that's important for us, I think: **long-term projects
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with small teams survive by having _less_ stuff going on.**
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2024-09-11 17:26:35 -07:00
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I won't get too much into why I chose to stick with upgrading the old app (built
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with [Rails](https://rubyonrails.org/)), instead of keeping the new Impress 2020
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app (built with [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/)). Mostly just, I think the Rails
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app is simpler tech overall, and leans more into standards that I expect to be
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longer-lived—and so I expect it to be easier to maintain and welcome new
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collaborators into long-term!
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We'll check in with y'all before retiring Impress 2020 altogether, I think
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there's still plenty of steps along the way! We're just doing our best, bit by
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bit.
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### Sustainability: Finding more time, with TNT's help
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At the start of the year, the reality of the situation was just… I did not
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_have_ volunteer hours available to give to DTI. What time I _did_ have for
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coding was all going toward my technical consulting work, because our house
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needed the paycheck, y'know?
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2024-09-11 17:26:35 -07:00
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But you might've noticed, our site's uptime got a lot better a few months ago—as
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it happens, around the same time we launched NeoPass! This was because **the
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NeoPass partnership _gave us the time_ to invest in other changes like alerts
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and monitoring,** which just weren't happening on their own.
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**The new "Shopping List" feature was also part of this partnership effort,
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too**—though we didn't end up building all of the integrated elements we were
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hoping for. _(We were planning an "Add all to cart" NC Mall link, as a time
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saver for folks, and a way to help TNT know that DTI helped you out.)_ Ah,
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well—that's product work! I hope it's been helpful in this form, too 💝
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**Right now, we're on a bit of a pause,** as TNT's dev team focuses on the Void
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Within plot and the other things on their plate. But our next plan is to look
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into (spoiler) ~~saving DTI outfits to your Neopets directly~~ 😳❗️ This is not
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a promise, but it _is_ an intention! It's the main integration y'all told us
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you'd be excited for in that survey we sent out, thank you for that btw!!
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But personally, that's why I'm excited about this partnership: I think we've
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done a good job threading the needle on building things that are **genuinely
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useful for Neopians, not Worrisome, and ultimately building toward DTI's own
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independent goals, too.** I'm glad we're not in the same stagnant place we were
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earlier this year, and I hope we can keep moving forward!
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2024-09-12 00:22:19 -07:00
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_(By the way, TNT and I decided not to talk too much about the details of, like,
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what we signed and stuff… I would normally say more, y'know? But I hope this
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gives you enough to understand the needs and values we're bringing to it! I
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promise I'm giving the community the best I know how to give, always 💜)_
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### As always, thank you!
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I hope this plan makes sense, as just one guy doing her best to keep the site
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online! And I hope this work can help set the stage for more people to join our
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team of maintainers in the coming years, too.
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