Feeling the Activity

I've resisted the temptation to instrument my sites but I feel the increase in traffic unexpected ways.

I reasoned that catering to viewers would distract me from my real purpose of making an unexpected experience that would only attract at scale.

I've also chosen to host fed.wiki.org with the single-threaded intended-for-development-only ruby server Webrick. This is inviting trouble for a public site.

Now I am feeling the trouble. It shows to me by edits that fail and therefore fork to my browser's local storage.

I once noticed this happen once every few weeks.

Now I see it happen every few hours.

Just now it happened every few paragraphs.

I was criticized publicly for bad implementation. The critic was some sort of expert in distributed systems. There are techniques I've yet to employ that will allow distributed computers to behave like a single computer in most instances. I suspect my failure to apply such machinery is at the root of his criticism.

I've heard of and seen systems spiral in complexity as they code for ever more complicated circumstances. Google Wave attributed its demise in part to the complexity of their federated model.

Life leaves much more up to chance. Sperm don't reliably reproduce, for example. But still life can be a great experience.

I aspire for a great experience. I think feeling the computers work underneath that experience will be ok. I have nothing to hide.