Happy Monday Rainers,
I wanted to post a quick technology update. It's been a bit more than six months since I came on as CEO. As I told the group in April and May, my first priority for ActiveRain has been and continues to be improving the underlying technology platform of ActiveRain.
We continue to invest a lot of time and money into stabilizing ActiveRain. I hope you have seen improvements over the last six months versus where ActiveRain had been six months or a year ago.
Though we have made a lot of improvements, there continue to be some challenges. As we peel back the onion in terms of improving page loading speed, site performance, and enhancing our ability to make changes to the site, we noticed the core Ruby on Rails platform and the database had not been udpated in nearly five years. There have been a number of enhancements to Ruby, Rails and PostgreSQL since then which we are not taking advantage of due to the age of the code base.
We have hired a company called Pivotal Labs which is one of the premier Ruby on Rails development companies in the US to help us with the upgrade. We will be implementing a test suite (there previously had not been a test suite at ActiveRain), upgrading Ruby to 1.9.2, upgrading Rails to 3.1, and upgrading our database PostgreSQL to the most current version. This process should take 8-12 weeks and will be ongoing until it is complete. You should not see any interruptions to service other than "builds" which will take place at night. We will notify everyone of any major site upgrades where you may see an interruption. Any "site maintenance" will generally take place late at night, on the weekends. We will communicate the timing in advance.
We hope that after this process is complete:
- Pages should load faster
- The site will be much more stable
- It will be much easier and faster to implement changes to the code base
We have our kick-off meeting with Pivotal tomorrow in San Francisco.
Happy Monday everyone!
Niki
