It’s been several years since we’ve last posted, but we just wanted to let you know that we’re still around, and we’re still doing our best to be relevant to your needs.

Wejoinin, as you may know, has always been a passion project for Hsiu-Fan and myself, and as so has always been run as a side project.

In this past year, we’ve done a lot of infrastructure upgrades to our system:

• We’ve switched out email providers
• We’ve upgraded parts of our frontend Javascript framework to use React.
• We’ve added new ways for you to chat with us, and we’ve done our best to be responsive as we can. (We know we haven’t been as snappy in responding as we could have been – we can do better!)
• We’ve secured the site with industry-standard SSL encryption.

Additionally, we had the graces of our intern Eli, who helped us accomplished a few major things, among them:

• Sheet archiving and restoring
• Refactoring and cleaning up parts of the legacy system that weren’t as clear or as clean as we’d like them to be.
• Squashing a bunch of bugs!

Today, Wejoinin stands still as a volunteer project, steadily humming as it ever has been since 2006. We also wanted to let you know that we aren’t going away anytime soon. We know you have a lot of ideas for us – we’ve heard a bunch of them and have a few good ideas up our sleeves.

Where do you want us to go from here? Let us know in our help widget on our site!

-Andrew

Hey folks,

Some of you have reported issues and errors of not being able to edit your sheets with Internet Explorer — we’re looking into it, but in the meantime we suggest you use one of the later versions of Web browsers such as IE10, Chrome or Firefox. That should get around the editing issues you may be experiencing. Thanks for your patience all!

-Andrew

Well folks, we’re in the middle of a site maintenance window from our hosts at prgmr.com. Essentially what happened was our app server is being switched to a different datacenter, and so we are having its IP block reassigned. Well in the meantime, we decided this is our chance to get our new beefy server up and running. Hsiu-Fan and I just spent the last few hours getting that beast up and running.

So all that to say is that Wejoinin is back, and it’s running our Rails 3-rewritten app. Now that being said, there are quite a lot of places in the code that need some love and TLC. If you’re having issues with any part of the site, please don’t hesitate to drop Hsiu-Fan or myself a line (email me at andrew at wejoinin dot com) and we’ll try to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks for your patience guys, we appreciate it. -Andrew

Ahoy! Good God… we haven’t updated this blog in three years.

Indeed… some things are changing here at Wejoinin. You might have noticed that we’ve basically been the same app for the past two years or so, and much of that has been because Hsiu-Fan and I have been balancing full-time work and other nifty ninja projects but we do admit that we’ve not been as up to snuff about keeping Wejoinin tidy and loved.

That is about to change… soon!

Early last year, we began a mythical Rails-2-to-Rails-3 upgrade that is due to be finished around the corner. In the process of doing so, we’ve beefed up our unit tests and integration test coverage to make refactoring code much easier in the future. We’ve also upgraded our server infrastructure for better and faster response times. In case any of you are wondering, I’m hoping to do a few blog posts about what that process has been like for us.

Many of you have been voicing concerns that certain parts of Wejoinin aren’t working for you. I just wanted to personally say thank you for your feedback, and we’re aware of the issues you’ve been alerting us to. I’ll be opening up a user feedback site for you to comment on different help issues and tickets you might want to send our way.

Finally, we’ve upgraded this blog to be Jekyll-powered and hosted it over at Github. Things are a’changing, and we’re excited to show you what’s next.

-Andrew

Hey folks,

I wanted to personally apologize to you all again for the site downtime we’ve experienced this weekend. Our host experienced a perfect storm of denial-of-service attacks and software failures in one of our machines that did not get addressed until early Monday morning. The problem was unfortunately out of our control. We’re looking into how we can prevent such scenarios from occurring in the future.

Thanks for understanding. Please don’t hesitate to contact me (andrew at wejoinin dot com) if you have any further questions.

-Andrew

Today, April 19 @ 12:02AM GMT, our site went down for a little bit. Turns out we’ve exceeded our allotted disk space. As of 3:49AM GMT, the issue has been fixed and Wejoinin should be back to normal now. Let us know if you’re finding any issues with your sheets.

When you run a Web app like Wejoinin on minimal VPS resources (read: we’re too poor to get a beefy server), it forces you to go lean. We started to realize a year ago that our out-of-the-box Rails and nginx/Mongrel setup was starting to show its age; resource utilization would climb every so often and we’d have to kill and restart a Mongrel worker thread. Every so often the site would slow down to a crawl and we’d realize oh shoot, we’re swapping.Well, with last night’s Wejoinin push, we’ve upgraded our server environment a few ways:

1. We’ve switched to prgmr.com with a killer deal on a 512MiB VPS. This is a step up from the 256 slice we used to hold at Slicehost at almost half the price.

2. We’ve switched from vanilla Ruby to Ruby Enterprise Edition — advertised to take “33% less memory [when used with Passenger]”. It’s got a tweaked garbage collector, memory allocator and the ability to go in a tweak memory usage settings for yourself.

3. We’ve set up Unicorn, the new HTTP server on the block. It’s special in that each worker is in its own process, meaning that the load balancing is done natively by the OS. Also, this means that should a worker process start to get bloated, we can take it down gracefully without touching the others. Really. We can trust the OS. Plus, Git’s doing it. Plus, Hsiu-Fan has a penchant for “unconventional” deployments. With all these tweaks, we should be seeing Wejoinin good and rarin’ to go. Let us know what you think!-Andrew

EDIT: We have completed the switch. As always, please let us know if anything is broken!

It’s been long in the works, but we are finally going through with our server transition. The last time we planned this out, there were a few server issues at our new host that made us hold off the fix. Things have stabilized recently, and we’re going to go ahead and make this happen.

Hsiu-Fan, Jason and Andrew have HENCEFORTH RESOLVED:

To peform site maintenance on Wejoinin on Sunday, March 14, from 2AM-4AM PST. Did we mention it’s pi day?

BE IT DECLARED:

That users will see minimal downtime and a nice little feature after the swap!

Thanks for your patience everyone!If you have any questions or concerns about the transition at any time, please feel free to email me (Andrew) or Hsiu-Fan.

-Andrew

Thank you, all of you, for your input, your comments and your support for Wejoinin. Hsiu-Fan, Jason, and I are proud to say we make something that makes people’s lives easier, be it sign-up sheets for your holiday potluck, to professor office hours, to the company party. We’ve got lots of cool things in store for 2010. From all of us at Wejoinin, we wish you a very happy new year!

-Andrew

Wejoinin is definitely growing—so much that we’re switching servers again!The good folks at prgmr.com have offered a killer deal on Xen VPS Web hosting that we just couldn’t pass up. In the early morning of Nov. 18, you should expect to see some minor downtime as we get the transition going.Thanks for hanging in there with us! We’ll keep you updated as best we can.

-Andrew

—Update: We’ve postponed the server transfer until we can resolve some deployment issues on our end. We’ll keep you notified with any happenings!