This is Technology Bytes, Episode 78 for September 1st, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I’m talking about a technology that I actually don’t know very much about.
I understand, I think, the basics of the concept, but I really don’t, I’m really not involved in anything but the use of this technology, not in the building of this technology.
And what am I talking about?
Well, I’m talking about a web server.
And what does that mean?
Well, what it meant for me early on in my adult life was it was the thing that served my website.
So I have a personal website at merrickfamily.com, a couple other ones that are tied to that domain.
And I’ve owned that domain for many, many years.
And so serving up that website was a web server often run, not often, but run by other companies.
So I think when I started, I was using GoDaddy, I think was the place I was hosting.
And then they became a little bit expensive and I went to one and one, and that was a better experience for me.
And then they were sold and moved to another company called, oh my goodness, I get email from them all the time.
I should have done a little bit of research.
Anyway, that is the very limited extent of knowledge I have about a web server.
Building my websites using tools to do so, it’s not very fancy.
It doesn’t really do anything.
I’m not doing any kind of commerce or anything like that.
But then in the last few years, I’ve gone to work for a company that relies on our web server to do all of the work that we do.
We have tools that our technology team has built that are served to us through the web.
So the way to get to our work tools is just through a browser window.
And it’s interesting because the tools are built such that actually Safari and the Apple world, it worked really, really well for a number of years, actually two plus.
And then in this latest release, I know I’m running the beta.
Those problems have risen their heads and I actually have to use Chrome to get my work done.
I don’t like it.
And I’ve actually talked about it before on this microcast.
But this week, week and a half, our web server has chosen to not serve us as it has in the last number of years.
And with the work that we have to get done, the tools that we use, we really cannot do our work if our web server is not performing properly.
And so this week has been a real struggle to try to get things done.
So what happens when a web server stops working or works intermittently or sporadically?
Well, what happens is if you are using tools, so if you have stores, if you have e-commerce, customers are not able to purchase your goods.
And that is one of the things that’s happened to us because the one part of our web server serves all of our customers.
So we build a back-end store for our customers' employees so they can order garments with their logos, company logo on them.
And those stores stop working properly and that hampers or even cuts off any income that we have as a company from those stores.
And obviously that is what pays our employees.
That’s what makes this company go.
And then on the back-end of that, or the next part of that, is once the orders come in, how do they get fulfilled?
Well, all of the tools we use to fill those orders, to place POs so that we can order garments that the customers want, and then we put the proper logo on them, all of that process happens on our web server using the tools developed by our technology team.
So when those stop working or work sporadically, the time that it takes to produce has been significantly increased.
The trouble that happens because things aren’t recorded properly has dramatically increased.
The employees' trust, now this is the company that I work for, their employees' trust of the system has decreased dramatically.
All those things add up to frustration, add up to lack of efficiency, they add up to work backing up because we can’t get through it in a timely manner.
And all of those things build to a level where employees don’t really enjoy being at work, myself included.
So trying to chase troubles, and I can’t even get the tools to load so that I can find items that might be lost or misplaced, or wondering if things are misplaced just because the tools aren’t working properly.
So lots of things that can happen when a web server goes awry.
And as I said at the beginning, I don’t have all that much experience at all with developing the web server or developing software for an operation that will run through a web server, just personal websites, and that’s way different than what I’m using at the moment.
And so what happens is we are at the mercy of the company that is hosting our web services and the server that those, that that service provider has built for us.
And when that stops working, we need their help to get it back online.
And that took a monumental effort from our technology, our CTO, our head of technology.
And even then, they weren’t performing to his liking.
And when they finally said, we’re just going to rebuild the entire server and give you a new platform to run your web services on, then we were excited.
Our technology officer was excited about that.
He said, that’s going to work, gave instructions, and then they built that web server and then just cut us over.
And so every tool, every store, everything came to a halt on Friday morning.
And actually, I’m not sure when it came back because our employees left, I left early.
But I know that our technology officer is going to be working through the long weekend.
And we’re hoping that come Tuesday, not only are we able to use the tools to perform the work that we do, but our customers' employees can use the backend stores to continue ordering product from us.
Overall, it’s been quite a learning experience.
It has added to some frustration for the work and also for our owner trying to make sure that we are serving our customers properly, all because a web server chose to not work properly.
Now, I say chose to as if it has a personality, but the reality is sometimes technology fails.
And I think at this point, having some kind of backup, some kind of way to make those problems get solved faster.
And it could be that we have a duplicate server that we can switch to at any time, and it continues to be duplicated with our data, with everything that we need to know so that we don’t experience this type of downtime.
I don’t know how expensive that is.
I don’t know if that’s a workable solution, but that may be something that we have to look into.
That being said, it’s still a web server technology that I know little about.
I just know this week it was quite frustrating.
Well, that is all I have for today.
Really just a rant on things not working properly.
If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
You can point me in the right direction if I said something wrong about web servers and how they actually work.
But I want to, as always, thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
