Ask HN: I really need your help (resolved)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3371938

by teej • 15 years ago

194 36 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hacker News -

I'm working on a mobile application called MinoMonsters. We are using a Ruby EventMachine backend to track behavior, persist user objects, and handle virtual good transactions.

I'm in a very sticky situation. Our user numbers are exploding off the charts and our backend is failing. It's silently crashing without leaving a trace. It's getting into some hard to reproduce states. The situation is not looking good.

And I need to get it fixed -tonight-.

I am looking for an experienced Ruby dev on a short term contract basis ASAP. I've set aside a budget to make this happen truly ASAP. Deep EventMachine experience is highly preferred, as that's the core source of my issues. San Francisco would be nice, but I'm willing to talk to anyone with the chops to help me fix this.

If you know someone who can help, please reach out. If you don't, you can help by sharing this post with someone who might.

I can be contacted at teej.murphy@gmail.com or by phone (410) 236 - 2894

EDIT: This is now resolved! Thanks for your help, HN. You guys are the best.

shahed2• 15 years ago

Emailed you, hoping to help out in any way possible!

tuananh• 15 years ago

people like you make me love HackerNews even more

shahed2• 15 years ago

Hah Thanks! I'm always looking to help! (:

beagle37• 15 years ago

I'm not a ruby person, and this post by Joe Damato made me want to stay as far away as possible from Ruby -- but perhaps it would be helpful in your case

http://timetobleed.com/the-broken-promises-of-mrireeyarv/

beagle37• 15 years ago

Would someone who downvoted me (or who understands the downvotes even if they did not downvote) explain the downvote?

I give reference to a site that describes a class of problems that might include the one described by the op. And it is both scary, and inherent to the existing Ruby implementations. And I also mention that this description keeps me even farther away from Ruby than I was.

And I get 5 downvotes (and counting?), and no comment. I'm not new here, and I do find this puzzling.

trustfundbaby• 15 years ago

I'm guessing the link looks like spam (broken promises of Mr blah blah blah???)

jinfiesto• 15 years ago

Honestly, It seems to me like it's probably for bad mouthing Ruby without obviously have having used it yourself. Ruby's pretty popular here, I assume that your comment didn't sit well with the Ruby groups here. While my own feelings toward the language are ambiguous, if you flippantly insulted one of my babies (Haskell, Scheme) my knee-jerk reaction might be to downvote you. Hopefully I'd curb it. Despite the fact that you've given some concrete reasons for staying away from Ruby vis-a-vis a link, I think you might have run into a bit of a tl;dr there. You should enumerate your problems with the language in your comments, or risk being downvoted.

xentronium2• 15 years ago

Although I didn't downvote you, you might have got your downvotes because your comment is irrelevant and not helpful.

Imagine someone struggling with tuning MySQL and someone else hijacking the thread with "MySQL is slow as molasses in January, use MongoDB/Cassandra/Distributed MapReduce in Erlang!". How does it help? If you want to discuss fundamental ruby issues like this one, submit your link separately.

WALoeIII• 15 years ago

Aman Gupta.

veverkap• 15 years ago

Francis Cianfrocca

gojomo• 15 years ago

If by 'silent crashes' you mean the process dies leaving no trace in Rubyland you might want deep OS/C++ expertise moreso than Ruby...

TheOnly92• 15 years ago

His saying that the backend is crashing.

swah2• 15 years ago

Bad title: I thought you were dying of starvation and needed urgent donations.

vog• 15 years ago

Not sure why your comment was downvoted. Indeed, it would have been better if the title was more concrete, such as: "Need the help from an experienced Ruby dev".

Nevertheless, I'm glad he got some helping hands despite the bad title.

swah2• 15 years ago

Me too, its a beauty of HN that folks always get helped.

teej• 15 years ago

Hey guys, thanks a TON for reaching out and helping me get this fixed. Through the efforts of Aman Gupta and my friend Ryan Stout, we were able to track down the source of the problem.

I really appreciate your help!

I promise to write up a blog post talking about my unique setup and how I fucked it up to lead to this problem.

polymatter• 15 years ago

I would just like to say how proud I am of this community, that a fellow hacker gets the help they need, when they most need it. Looking forward to that blog post.

JadeRobbins• 15 years ago

Awesome, I saw Aman give an EventMachine talk at MountainWest RubyConf and Ryan Stout is a local that is always willing to help out.

What a community indeed!

tectonic• 15 years ago

Can you tell us what the problem was?

Dobbs• 15 years ago

You might want to edit and remove your phone number.

blueprint• 15 years ago

Is there a blog link I can bookmark and check later?

xentronium2• 15 years ago

So, what was it? I am very-very curious.

chris_dcosta• 15 years ago

I don't know how often HN get trawled, but you might want to think about removing or obfiscating your details, now that your issue is solved.

itmag2• 15 years ago

To the person who fixed the problem: are you putting this on your resumé and if so how are you describing it?

I imagine something like this might be VERY attractive to certain employers.

itmag2• 15 years ago

Also, idea for a startup: Fix My Crisis. Advertise jobs like this when your ops go fubar and you need a deep expert to come in and save your ass ASAP. Reward them with cash and/or resumé glory.

mjs00• 15 years ago

I like it. Maybe even beyond or in addition something like "Code Concierge" -- for a variety of reasons it might be nice to have an ongoing relationship with individual/team/org for problems, advice, etc, that is not a typical consulting agreement, but is more than ad hoc posts to HN or Stack Exchange.

mkopinsky• 15 years ago

I could also see this being abused. "Plz hlp!!1 my website stop working don't know why, my teacher need this ASAP". Maybe if you deal with the payment issues up front you could get around this (no one's gonna shell down real money up front unless they have a real problem), but it's something to be figured out.

_ud4a• 15 years ago

it's great to see people come together and help each other out in such short timeframe.

However, one thing i noticed is that the user posting this "teej" is a popular user on HN with a high karma and post count. Do you guys believe that's one of the reason this post got lots of up votes to make it to the front to get the help needed? I'm just thinking, what if someone new had posted this link? would it have gotten buried within the first hour? I sure hope not.

Ask HN: I really need your help (resolved)

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