Welcome to our new developer logs! We plan on releasing these every two to three weeks to to highlight recent work, what’s coming next, what’s happening behind the scenes, and to pull back the curtain on what’s cooking.

1. What we shipped

This week was busy as we prepare for the imminent release of Kanka 3.6, but we still managed to ship the following performance improvements to better handle the endless onslaught of AI bots scraping Kanka for content.

• We made every page slightly lighter to reduce bandwidth use and server load.
• We cached more static content at the edge to cut down further on requests hitting our servers.
• We serve longer cache headers for AI bots so that they don’t request the same pages every minute hoping for updates. For some reason, one bot in Hong Kong keeps checking an empty calendar in an abandoned public campaign.

2. What we’re working on next

We’ll release Kanka 3.6 and then start making Whiteboards interactive using websockets, a technology that’s new to us. This will require new infrastructure and all that jazz.

We’re also busy writing scripts for new, up to date YouTube tutorial videos, so subscribe to our channel to catch them when they drop.

3. Behind the scenes

During the summer, we introduced a “replica” database server to handle requests from bots and unlogged users. Every now and then, this replica server breaks and we have to restart the replication from scratch. This happened again during the weekend. I’ve automated most the process, but it still takes about two hours from start to finish. Luckily, this is only the second time it’s happened (last time it took me the better part of a day to restart), but I am on the lookout for a more permanent solution.

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Hopefully you enjoyed this little peek at what we’re working on. We plan to keep these short but frequent. If you want even more tea on upcoming updates, consider joining our Discord.