HMC Weekly Recap - 7/8

Abner Coimbre is our Handmade Cities founder. You may reach the author at abner@handmadecities.com

Dear Handmade folks,

This “recap” is actually an important notice that our primary server saw a dangerous spike in CPU usage, RAM usage, and traffic. Here’s a CPU chart:

That’s a single jump from 68% to 93%! We were then at ninety-plus (and climbing) until our VPS provider throttled us, which unfortunately killed various Handmade services. For example: our meetup host for London couldn’t understand why his July newsletter was not delivered to email subscribers.

We have since restored all services and delivered missing emails.

So yeah… Mariano was absolutely right we need an observability stack sooner rather than later. HMC had a recent growth spurt of email subscribers with applications to join Handmade Revolt (which, interestingly, happened shortly after our new AI policy.) Mariano is investigating root causes and adding mitigations for when the servers get hammered again.

Why Am I Telling You This?

It’s just a reminder that Handmade Cities isn’t on auto-pilot :) Mariano, yours truly, and various contributors keep the machinery well-oiled!

Wanna help? Check out the public roadmap. If there’s some task you want to pick up email the server admin at u.g.a.mariano@gmail.com. You may also suggest new tasks for us.

Thank you for being here,
Abner Coimbre