Happy New Year ya’ll 
. I’m excited for how Shmeppy will grow this year 
, I hope ya’ll are too. I’ve got some plans I wanted to share with ya’ll.
This month I’ve been focusing on (and will continue to focus on) the “robustness” of Shmeppy:
- how speedy it feels to users
- security against threats such as DDoS and data theft
- how often it goes down
- its resilience to catastrophic failure
Performance
I spent last week and this creating an automatic way to prepare a new server running Shmeppy. It’s a boring but essential task that will allow me to run performance tests on Shmeppy in such a way that the results are trustworthy. With that done I can now start directly hunting down the problems that led to the release at Quick performance fix: more power.
Backups
After that I’ll be fixing some issues with my backup system. This is the system that copies all of the data on Shmeppy (mostly maps and accounts) and bundles it up so that if Shmeppy.com catastrophically fails I can create a new Shmeppy from the ashes without (much) lost data.
Currently the backups are placed on a server that doesn’t have a ton of disk space. So I have to (fairly often) manually copy those backups somewhere else and clear them off that server.
Beyond That
I’m hesititant to spend too much more time on this “robustness” work when there’s a lot of user-facing things that I’d like to focus on.
But I will probably spend some time creating a more reliable workflow for upgrading the software that Shmeppy depends on. Currently Shmeppy is more vulnerable to attack than is altogether comfortable because the software that it is standing on doesn’t get updated often enough.
But we’ll see how priorities shake out as I continue moving forward on all this. I am constantly evaluating and re-evaluating what’s most important.
. On Saturday I’m getting my furnace replaced, so I just gotta make it til then.