Steem's dysfunctional family...
So, I happened to hear a funny story about an ETH dev complaining about the oligarchy that runs ETH. They were sick of it. No way to break in, and frustrated by the lack of accountability. A Steemian said "Give our dysfunctional family a try." The ETH dude said "I'll take a dysfunctional family over this any day."
The dysfunctional family comes through
Today there were a lot of people that were involved in fixing the hard fork problems. Steemit, top 20 witnesses, and backup witnesses worked together to fix a bug that was difficult to model in the testnet that made it into the code.
You might be thinking "but aggroed, your stupid fucking hard fork fucked up and ruined everything!" I'd argue it's not quite true. The chain stopped because a bug made some user data break rules. The chain did what it was supposed to do. You could make an argument that this didn't go perfectly, but honestly, a few hour downtime is a small price to pay to get a better trending page and a DAO/SPS.
Props
I'd like to give special props to @reggaemuffin who seems to have been the first to vocalize the likely source of the bug in the code. There were some great plays made by the highly technical witnesses of @gtg, @anyx, @netuoso, @cervantes, @therealwolf, and @drakos. @smooth was good for smart commentary as per usual. I'm especially grateful to @someguy123 and his quick updates to steem in a box. No secret that I'm less technical, and his program and someguys work there allows me and several other witnesses to keep this chain running.
Second shout out to @therealwolf for his witness essentials kit. I stopped using conductor and now use this. it's pretty nice. In addition to 190 blocks that most of the top 20 missed while gandalf restarted I also missed a few block. Witness Essentials got me rotated to a backup witness and was running again without missing a beat.
What did I do as a non-dev?
Today I did my best to help make sure good ideas were shared and fetch whatever I could for various groups of devs working on different pieces of this whole thing. Coordination and questions can be helpful. I also paid attention and got my witness up and running nearly as quickly as the more technical devs did. Was getting blocks and building the chain within a few minutes of the tech boyz.
Steemit
I think the Steemit team did a good job today. @justinw and @vandeberg were acceessible and helpful. @elipowell and @andrarchy had steemit.com updated, twitter updated, and had a well timed and accurate post about the hardfork and it's implementation.
Today could have sucked, but it didn't
I know it was frustrating. I'm kinda wiped from the day. But at the end of the day we have a cleaner trending, a functioning proposal system, and a team that did it's job. The negative voices will say today sucked, it was a clusterfuck, and everything was terrible and bad. But within a few hours we're up and running, a longer term fix is coming, and we have a chain that works. it's game on. So, don't let the perma-haters get you down.
Happy #newsteem day and welcome HF21
Palnet, Steem-Engine, Steem Keychain, and Splinterlands are all open for business. See you there!
This shows how when Steemit and Witnesses work as a team, we can make Steem great again. Thanks all for your hard work.
Agree with everything! Well a bit less with cleaner trending :) you speak about "downvotes euphoria" without speaking lol and I disagree with this "euphoria"
Posted using Partiko Android
Agreed, it was a good day. People were watching their witness nodes and reacted quickly to diagnose and solve the problem, and implement the fix. Good work to everyone mentioned in this post!
This changes makes steem great again for sure. To be honest I expect bugs or glitches as before but it was perfect transition. Didn't see changes in the front end.
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvoting this reply.
There will always be people complaining, trying to detract. Those people usually don’t know what it takes to go from test to live. There are almost always unintended consequences when you bring any change in a live environment. I’m glad there were lots of people on hand and willing to pitch in to figure it out! I was luckily offline all day so I didn’t witness the drama unfold but it doesn’t seem as bad as HF20 so awesome job in my eyes.
Not sure if it’s isolated to @partiko but the app is only showing people at 25 rep, if it’s a bug with them then it will never get fixed lol they haven’t responded in a long time to bugs.
Busy.org was also showing 25 rep to all users during the day, it seems back to normal.
Thanks for this, add a non dev I was not affected. Looking forward to the future. Glad all is up and moving forward.
Posted using Partiko Android
Considering that every major corporation suffers network reachability issues every year (hacking, DDoS), it's not so bad when Steem suffers a downtime. The most important thing is having alert engineers and developers capable of analyzing, pinpointing and fixing the problem within a few hours. I've seen this many times since being a witness, wether it was hardfork transitions or blockchain bugs/attacks. I have nothing but praise to the whole Steem family.
I've read a few bitchings here and there during the HF freeze, it often comes from the same people who bring little value to the ecosystem. To them I say, instead of whining, do something constructive next time, it's your blockchain too, remember that.
I still stumble upon Reddit going down and I'm not even there as much as pre-steem. There will always be bitchings, worst one was when Steemit was being DDOSed for many days that one time and a tweet was saying how they are "losing money" because of it. It was baffling on so many levels it became funny, hence I remember it so well.
It is all well and good.
That image really reminds me of a currency from Path of Exile!
Exalted orb
Chaos orb
Brilliant game. I run a 24 hour Hardcore race when each new season/league drops.
I'll be posting the announcement in early September. Be great to have you in the race.
woohoo thanks for all the hard work!
After the last hardfork, I expected there to be glitches. It came back a lot faster this time, or at least that I remember. It was a lot smoother from my casual perspective. Thanks, techie people! :)
!COFFEEA
compared to the last few hard forks, todays fork was relatively painless and quick, barring the pre-fork doomsayer kvetching in chat. thanks to the people who worked so industriously on the fork to see it done so smoothly.
Great teamwork - we can wait 10 hours if this will benefit Steem
I've never been compelled to learn to code; but I'd love to understand what happened.
If we take over the net, maybe Netflix will make a TV series about it and post it on their 3speak account ;)
Probably the only thing I like about HF21 is the free downvotes, it will give us better trending pages which will hopefully attract more people here.
Sounds like teamwork to me. Heads up to all of you! :>)
Posted using Partiko iOS
OH so that his how they were supplied with coffee... perfect.
Well, it was much smoother than HF20! Steem was unusable for many days.
A few hours is not so bad.
Well done to everyone. The dysfunctional family pulls together when it has to.
I used to prepare operations for the roll out of multi seat instances of SAP or ORACLE ERP systems. The last project I worked on was a merger of two gigantic UK civil service departments onto on instance of SAP R3 from multiple smaller instances of everything down to and including Excel sheet accounting. This was to run the UK's entire tax collecting infrastructure.
I've got to say, compared to the centralised team of 100's of consultants (including a team of Indian programmers we flew into the UK and housed in Kensignton because we couldn't find their skills in the UK and we weren't allowed to outsource) the upgrade of a decentralised system like Steem seems like complete magic. I have no idea how so many people are organised to work together in such an efficient manner.
So few people understand what it takes to keep a system up and running. I'm delighted with the way Steem works and when it fails, it fails publicly in ways we can understand and watch it get fixed. Not just a "glitch".
So thanks to those more technical than me who keep this kind of thing working.
test
second test