Nick Finishes The Job

Ahh what a lovely thing to hear:

Deltik has moved onto a shared webhost and a VPS, provided by Almighty Servers.
Our previous webhost, IsMyWebsite, has pretty much committed suicide. We’re outta there.

So a suicide eh? That would imply I intentionally did something to damage/kill the service. Ahh I remember now what I did. You’re right. Unfortunately, if I didn’t go along with it I was considered unreasonable and inflexible.

Since version 5 is ‘almost done’ as it was for the last 5 weeks before I finally pulled the plug on it, why don’t you just launch it then? I’ll let you use one of our domains (say ismywebsite.info) and just see how it goes. Since I’m sure a launch was imminent.

You can expect Deltik to be much more stable and have less downtime. (No guarantees; it’s possible that I can accidentally botch up something because I’m not used to the new provider..)
Also, Deltik should load faster now. The new hosting provider outperforms our old one.

Well Mr. Liu, I wish you luck with the reliability. I’ve set up monitoring on it and only time will tell. As for loading faster, it might be worth your while to do a side by side comparison. For the record though, it still appears you’re comparing a VPS to a free hosting plan. Not only that, but for someone so opposed to the invite system, due to it restricting our services from being usable by anyone, it sounds like you have an exclusive deal with the host.

As for “it’s possible that I can accidentally botch up something because I’m not used to the new provider”, it’s not only possible but highly probable if this is your first time with a VPS especially.

Oh and get this – I heard about this from our (apparently unreliable and slow) provider WebLyte. Why? Well because of a script driving up the CPU load on your account nonetheless:

They had a script driving up the server load consistently for about 5 minutes to 2.00+

So if there’s a death here, it’s certainly not suicide.

However, there’s still a heartbeat. There are still people who believe in this site and this service, and that’s the only reason it isn’t dead. I may not see that path out of where we are, but I can tell you without a doubt that a small group of committed people can do anything. In fact, that’s about how anything gets started or happens in this world.

Nick is a very smart capable person, who did care a great deal. Unfortunately, he chose at one point to view me as an adversary, someone to be undermined and given false progress reports, and later to be opposed in a strong fashion. Since a strongly divided team is not really one at all, at that point, I had but two choices – give Nick and all the other developers the hosting entirely (which Nick didn’t even want) or take back control and do what I could to salvage things. I didn’t see any decent working relationship between me and Nick at that point. Thus, there was no other option.

But most likely Nick’s criticism will be of my blog posts here, reflecting my concerns, fears, and worries about what could happen, which not surprisingly came true in the end. You can argue if through posting, I somehow affected his team’s morale and took their courage and made them take longer to finish things. You could argue that my attempts to discuss with them what needed to be done, and try to even determine what was going on, did in fact slow them down. The fact still stands, aside from changing the password once out of frustration, they had full access the entire time and any questions about my code I answered in full.

In fact, however, if I know anything about Nick and the type of person he is, he loves a challenge, and the more people who tell him it can’t be done, the harder he works at it. It’s truly unfortunate he believed that 8 months of coding could be done in 1 month, even by a team as skilled as his, and under his devoted leadership. There was a point I realized the only thing holding him to keep working was this burning desire to prove me wrong. It wasn’t until I finally told him that I really appreciated the hard work and I wanted to support that version 5 and potentially use it, that he appeared suddenly to become very busy with school and homework and all these other commitments started getting mentioned. I kind of predicted that would happen as well. That’s when I pulled the plug.

And so Nick, the previous project I mentioned in my last blog post – everyone thinks I’m crazy to even attempt such a thing. People say it’s impossible. Nobody’s ever done it. Why – because it’s just too hard. Sessions and cookies are too complicated to figure out, let alone build a working virtual browser. Maybe you could do it – nah you’re too busy. It’s too great a challenge. There’s no possibility of success. You’ll fail. You’re not good enough. It’s probably impossible. It wont work. How would you even do it anyways? Yeah, like I said, pretty much impossible. There’s no way you could do it. You shouldn’t even try.

Good luck.