We finally outgrew the rather gnarly method we were using to provide custom ringback tones. We, of course, had anticipated this and were in the midst of testing a vastly more elegant (and flexible) method.
We moved that new method into production yesterday and the system is running smoothly again. If you are still experiencing long periods (more than a few seconds) of silence after the sponsor’s message please let us know here.
We are implementing a new ad delivery system today and we’ve had some reports of calls not completing and/or hearing nothing but silence.
Until we can resolve this we have rolled back to our old system.
We’re sorry for the inconvienence — it worked during testing. No really, it did! We promise it did!
Stay tuned for updates.
We promised that this blog would allow you to follow along with the development of Brring — to watch us ‘make the sausage’ as it were. Well, sometimes it isn’t pretty; this is one of those times.
I’m found of saying, much to the chagrin of my friends, that start-ups are strange beasts. They exist in a bit of a reality distortion field (RDF) generated by the founders. This is the source of the energy start-up folks use to build companies (and markets) from nothing. It takes a special kind of person to thrive at a start-up; someone who can draw energy and inspiration from that RDF and commit enormous amounts of personal resources (time and emotion) as well as incur the financial risks asscociated with a fledgling company.
The Brring Team is comprised of seasoned start-up veterans. We have the experience (and scars) from several prior start-up ventures so none of this is news to us. We also understand that our members may not have that experience, nor should they need it, to enjoy our Service. However, there are a few things that we do need to share with you that, we hope, will give you an insight into the operation of our ‘baby’.
The engineering gnomes successfully performed the database maintenance this morning. All is back to normal.
For those among you that share this author’s sleep-deprived, caffeine addicted and woefully under appreciated engineering career path here is what we did today.
Brring’s systems started life based on a popular content management system. After a few months of development we realized that it was not a good fit for the website we were building so we ditched it. However, since we had a fair amount of data already loaded into the database we decided to keep it as-is and drop the unnecessary stuff later. Well, it’s later.
Today we dropped a slew of unused tables from our production database. We, of course, performed a good deal of testing on our development system before rolling this out. The good news is that we now have a lean, mean, database schema (yes, I realize that does not rhyme) that has about 1/2 the number of tables of the original.
Nice.
The gnomes have some necessary database maintenence to perform and 9AM Eastern is one of our quietest hours.
The service will be down for only a few minutes. During this time no calls will go through to your private numbers and the website will be unavailable.
