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We use Fogbugz for all our internal project tracking. The consensus among our engineers is that this downtime is understandable and we'd rather deal with it, e

by mdc 14y ago

We use Fogbugz for all our internal project tracking. The consensus among our engineers is that this downtime is understandable and we'd rather deal with it, even in a mission-important web app, than pay more every month to insure redundancy was available. Frankly this is just making us appreciate Fogbugz all the more since tracking our time without it will be a real PITA.

j45 14y ago
My first thought is that everyone affected is doing OK. I'm sure that everyone just wants their stuff working too, like electricity. :) I do hope at a better time, Fogbugz can consider redundancy/failover that Stack Overflow enjoyed.
kranner 14y ago
I don't know what Fogbugz costs, but they really should start charging for Trello now, esp. if they can use some of that revenue to add geo-redundancy. Trello is fantastic, but now I'm worried that I'm too dependent on it and I should arrange an offline alternative. Take my money, Fog Creek.
- egeozcan 14y ago
  I totally agree. Did this thing have an export function or should I be prepared creating a scraper?
  - kranner 14y ago
    There is an export-to-JSON, from whose output I'm now trying to salvage my project notes. There is also a print option, but that doesn't seem to print the back of the cards so it's pretty useless, unless I'm mistaken.
  - benajnim 14y ago
    There is an api: trello.com/docs/api
- spolsky 14y ago
  Geo-redundancy is a tough engineering problem. We're building a long term solution but it's a lot of work and it's not in place today. If this is the kind of problem that excites you, we're hiring :-)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - enigmo 14y ago
    It's particularly hard to shoehorn in after the fact. Certain development models (e.g. replicated state machines) make it much easier... mix in some magic Paxos dust and it can handle machine failures as well. Sadly the better implementations I've used myself (or have heard about) are not publicly available. The closest thing in semi-widespread use seems to be Zookeeper, but it's more like Oracle when you really wanted SQLite (standalone service vs. library).
  - lww 14y ago
    How tough it is depends on how you're engineering your geo-redundancy. I've been doing it since 1998 and a simple active-passive solution is not as hard as some would believe but it does cost money. Active-Active is much more challenging and multi-master is obviously the ideal and the most difficult to engineer with geo-network latency. I haven't seen one solution that couldn't be staged to at least provide active-passive DR capability for a pretty reasonable price. You can even do it in EC2, RackSpace Cloud or Joyent if your feeling "cloudy".
jemfinch 14y ago
Either your engineers are underpaid or you're anticipating a larger price hike than would seem justified to gain the redundancy you need.
- nthj 14y ago
  Or the engineers want to work on interesting problems, rather than patching the bug tracker every 2 weeks. In my experience, what self-hosted bug-tracking systems might gain in redundancy (a few hours every time a major storm hits) they lose to context switches (which hit team morale, not merely time.) "Hey, Bob! Can you reset the MySQL server again on the bug-tracking maze set up by Fred over 4 years ago?" Bob obligingly does so, and then, having been interrupted in the middle of a hard problem, loses his place and can't get back up to speed by the end of day. So while you may gain four hours of butt-in-seat time, you're losing four hours of real productivity on a far more frequent basis. I'd rather pay Fog Creek to worry about that stuff, and actually ship products.

by mdc 14y ago

j45 14y ago

My first thought is that everyone affected is doing OK. I'm sure that everyone just wants their stuff working too, like electricity. :) I do hope at a better time, Fogbugz can consider redundancy/failover that Stack Overflow enjoyed.

kranner 14y ago

I don't know what Fogbugz costs, but they really should start charging for Trello now, esp. if they can use some of that revenue to add geo-redundancy. Trello is fantastic, but now I'm worried that I'm too dependent on it and I should arrange an offline alternative. Take my money, Fog Creek.

egeozcan 14y ago
I totally agree. Did this thing have an export function or should I be prepared creating a scraper?
- kranner 14y ago
  There is an export-to-JSON, from whose output I'm now trying to salvage my project notes. There is also a print option, but that doesn't seem to print the back of the cards so it's pretty useless, unless I'm mistaken.
- benajnim 14y ago
  There is an api: trello.com/docs/api
spolsky 14y ago
Geo-redundancy is a tough engineering problem. We're building a long term solution but it's a lot of work and it's not in place today. If this is the kind of problem that excites you, we're hiring :-)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- enigmo 14y ago
  It's particularly hard to shoehorn in after the fact. Certain development models (e.g. replicated state machines) make it much easier... mix in some magic Paxos dust and it can handle machine failures as well. Sadly the better implementations I've used myself (or have heard about) are not publicly available. The closest thing in semi-widespread use seems to be Zookeeper, but it's more like Oracle when you really wanted SQLite (standalone service vs. library).
- lww 14y ago
  How tough it is depends on how you're engineering your geo-redundancy. I've been doing it since 1998 and a simple active-passive solution is not as hard as some would believe but it does cost money. Active-Active is much more challenging and multi-master is obviously the ideal and the most difficult to engineer with geo-network latency. I haven't seen one solution that couldn't be staged to at least provide active-passive DR capability for a pretty reasonable price. You can even do it in EC2, RackSpace Cloud or Joyent if your feeling "cloudy".

jemfinch 14y ago

Either your engineers are underpaid or you're anticipating a larger price hike than would seem justified to gain the redundancy you need.

nthj 14y ago
Or the engineers want to work on interesting problems, rather than patching the bug tracker every 2 weeks. In my experience, what self-hosted bug-tracking systems might gain in redundancy (a few hours every time a major storm hits) they lose to context switches (which hit team morale, not merely time.) "Hey, Bob! Can you reset the MySQL server again on the bug-tracking maze set up by Fred over 4 years ago?" Bob obligingly does so, and then, having been interrupted in the middle of a hard problem, loses his place and can't get back up to speed by the end of day. So while you may gain four hours of butt-in-seat time, you're losing four hours of real productivity on a far more frequent basis. I'd rather pay Fog Creek to worry about that stuff, and actually ship products.