[sldev] Just askin': How are we doing?

[Nicholaz Beresford]

Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> We spend a lot more time than that on fixing problems.
> 
> In terms of how our developers spend their time right now, it's more 
> like nine months out of twelve spent fixing stuff, for loose values of 
> "fixing" and "stuff".  Remember, we have to work on problems that have 
> massively different timescales.  When griefers find a new attack mode, 
> we have to be able to respond within hours.  At the same time, we have 
> to look a year into the future and ensure that the infrastructure we 
> build now can cope with the users and concurrency levels we'll be seeing 
> then.

I believe you.  I was just looking at the releasenotes doc and the list
of changes is impressive.  The odd thing however is, that even being a
developer myself, this sort of escaped me.

I know that it must be hell to go through the changes in infrastructure
I think in my first week the concurrency broke through 20000 and the
grid felt as if it was falling apart and just a moment ago it sailed
easily on with over 45000 online.  It's been incredible growth, that's
for sure.


> We spend comparatively little of our time working on new features.  For 
> example, the recent addition of sculpted prims was due almost entirely 
> to one person working furiously in his spare time for months.  The 
> Windlight code turned up as part of the acquisition of a team of great 
> developers we didn't even have before.

I was just mentioning today to a friend that what Qarl did there was a
terrific job.  I think I did not see a single bug outside the sculpties
realm (that is addition of scuplties breaking something else).

But even if not much work went into Windlight and Voice, the
annoucements of those versions came with pretty bad timing.



> Fixing stuff is our top priority.

Again, I do believe you, but at the same time I can say that until
this mail I didn't see it.  Maybe it boils down to communication, or
maybe you guys have sort of given up letting the public know what's
behind problems or what you are working on because no matter what
you do, you get a beating from the public anyway.

I don't imply spin-doctoring when saying communication, quite the
opposite.  On the SL blog or forum things always got worse, when
there was no word from LL about the problems at all.

Maybe I just have a too narrow view and came online through bad
times, but I can understand a lot of comments on the SL blog or
in the forums or blogosphere, because from the outside things are
looking a lot different than from the inside.


I really don't want to bash on you guys, I know that getting through
a growth rate like this must be hell, but I guess it would really
help if more of your efforts behind the scene would be visible on
the outside (I think that "post mortem" post on the blog as really
a good example for that and was also received well).


People really love your platform/world, that's why they are going
beserk if it doesn't work.  And I love it, otherwise I would throw
my hours at some other open source project.

I'll keep my fingers crossed that 1.18 will be remembered as the
version when things got better again (as many people told me that
things went downhill with 1.14).


Keep it up ...


Nick