The Day That Steemit Stood Still!

Hey Again, Steemitizens!

The Discord Chat started lighting up around 3AM EST this morning. (7AM GMT0) with reports that users were receiving errors related to exceeding their bandwidth usage. Reports came in fast and furious from all over the world in steemit.chat channels and across the discord universe. It got a little crazy and it is apparently still happening to many users even as I type this.

Once we determined it was a widespread issue, folks began to calm down some, but only some as they wondered if the platform was collapsing or if it was an issue with their individual accounts.

I'm just here to suggest you DON'T PANIC!

This platform has a lot of potential, but it's still an infant in the terms of young software that has not yet reached maturity.

As far as I can determine, there is only a very small core software development team on this project, and to be honest, as a software company owner and 30 year tech career veteran, I don't honestly believe the team is 100% optimal or experienced in scaling systems of this sort. I honestly don't know anything much about who the actual steemit.inc developers are, but the glaring errors and omissions seen throughout the site speak to a general lack of experience in building web applications for mass consumption.

But don't throw away your account keys just yet!

The bandwidth errors seen today are clearing up for most users who have reported them after simply waiting for a short period of time. It's not a system killing issue and I am sure the devs have been well alerted and are researching the patch to fix it in real time, right now. It would worry me a great deal if they were NOT doing so, but since there has been no official announcement about the issue that I have seen, I can only hope it's because they are too busy working on it.

In the team and platform's defense, this is a new kind of system. To a point, basic software development life cycle issues here will be common and traditional, but new things are bound to crop up that no one has ever had to solve before. It happens. That's why software engineers usually make the big bucks! We solve problems, and keep the systems running that people and businesses rely on.

Also, there are quite literally tens of thousands of potential problems possible within a web application eco-system. Many of you will recall last week when steemit had issues uploading and displaying images. In that case, the problem wasn't even steemit software at all, but rather transient network issues between steemit and the image storage server cloud. The developers at steemit couldn't have done much of anything about it, and we all had to wait for the internet to sort itself out. Which it did, fairly quickly in that case.

So folks, remember. Save your important blogs outside of steemit. If you have friends here that you might lose if the site disappeared or went down for a significant period of time, have a backup plan for a way to stay in touch with them. Keep copies of the images you use often somewhere besides in your old blog articles, something I am guilty of myself, as I just cut and paste my images into my articles and don't bother to save them very often from my graphics editor. I don't upload them elsewhere, I just ctrl-c/ctrl-v them right into my posts and I will be first to admit that this is a great way to add images and a very sloppy way to archive them, all at the same time.

Anyway, steemit is just barely a baby piece of software at this scale after existing as a public beta for less than 24 months and we need to keep that in mind, protect our content ourselves, keep track of our friends in ways we wont lose them if this platform changed or went away and in general practice good blogger "hygiene" on our own, without relying on the platform to do it for us.

This is not twitter or facebook with billions of users and dollars to pay for support teams and development efforts and redundancies. It's a barely built, minimum viable product with issues and foibles and a LOT of work remaining to be done.

Keep that in mind before you flame chat channels with support demands, answered mostly by volunteer fellow steemitizens and remember, we can eventually become the next big platform, but first we gotta learn to crawl, and walk before we can run.

Have a pleasant Sunday!

And just like that, this post is over.

Full steem ahead, steemitizens!

@sircork

Tune into my show: Monday Night Minnow School on The MSP Waves Radio Network
Get more info about this and other great steemit MSP talk-radio shows at:
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Witnesses I support:

@aggroed, @teamsteem, @gtg, @timcliff, @klye, @clayop, @ausbitbank, @dragosroua, @rolandp, @jesta, @personzzz (@personz), @lok1, @someguy123, @thecryptodrive, @netuoso, @good-karma, @lukestokes.mhth, @klye, @theprophet0, @steemed and @followbtcnews (@crimsonclad)

Think you deserve to be on this list too?

Earn my vote. Tell me why!

Be sure to learn what witnesses are and vote here!

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Witnesses that I am trying to find time to investigate on recommendations from others:
@anyx, @pfunk, @riverhead, @curie