I haven't written in my blog here in quite a while, but since MySpace is down right now, I needed a place to vent my frustrations. Let me explain why I'm venting... in a former life before I was a full-time photographer, I was a full-time computer geek. I worked for a tele-communications company managing their web servers.

(geek speak alert! This is about to get confusing to those who are computer challenged)

At this company I worked for, we had a lot of redundancy, 2 main servers, 2 fail-over servers, and 2 test servers. The 2 main servers were load balanced by a Coyote Point system, and the code on all 4 production servers (main+failover) was only updated after thorough testing on the 2 test servers. Pretty redundant, and more than enough server capacity for our purposes.

Well, tonight I go to login to MySpace and get the following message...

"The function that you are currently trying to use is disabled and will be back shortly.
4/7/2025We are making some minor changes to this section, please bear with us until we can get this back online. Please do NOT email me about this. Just wait it out. 8/17/2007
-Tom"

The FUNCTION I was trying to use was LOGIN!!! What production level web site disables login on a whim? Tom, don't you TEST anything? Granted, if there's a huge security hole in your production code, one might want to disable logins until it's fixed, but this is not the first or even second time this has happened. I've seen this issue on a number of occasions. It seems like MySpace code is updated on-the-fly, and if the frequency of updates is any indication, it's updated without any forethought or testing!

They mention that they are making "minor" changes. Well how long does that really take? The site has been down for at least an hour now, maybe longer. Sounds like more than a "minor change" to me! I noticed recently that the mail links (inbox, sent, etc.) had changed designs that didn't really fit the overall look of the site. Are they doing un-notified public beta testing for new changes to the site?

Listen, I'll be the first to admit that I update the code on my own website on a whim, without thorough testing, because when I make a change I do have a fair idea of the outcome, and it's not frequently hit by that many people. For complicated changes, I also tend to test code on my Linux server at home before deploying to my production server. But if I were running a website tapped my millions of people every day, I think I might curtail the practice of "instant untested deployment" for a more stringent QA process. Make changes, but make sure it works, and then deploy the tested changes. That's all I'm saying folks!