A lot of updates under the hood

For the last 2 days, I was working hard on updating a lot of stuff under the hood. Not the site itself, but the system, all the system packages, the applications it uses, the database server, the python programming language on which it all runs, all the packages we use in python, Django framework on which the whole site is built, and all the JavaScript libraries we use.

It wasn't that hard, but pretty time consuming and nerve wracking 😄. A lot of things might have gone wrong, and I had to do some of the updates directly on the live server, without testing it before. That's why some of you might have experienced a few short periods of unavailability, and see the 'maintenance' screen for the first time. Everything was thoroughly planned, and went really well 🙂. The site should now be stable, and without any issues.

We sometimes have to perform these maintenance updates to ensure security and reliability of the site, and also make it possible for us to work with the latest features out there 🙂. People are working hard to make all those languages and packages as good and fast as possible, and we don't want to miss that, that's for sure 🙂.

Please make sure to let me know if you find any usability issues with the site. It seems there's nothing that went wrong, but one never knows 🤨.

And now we can continue with the regular updates of the site 🙂. Thank you all for reading, and don't forget to participate in the first weekly challenge we made!