The sound of silence
During the first week or two of January the Bear servers were experiencing some instability. The resource usage would go through the roof causing a short period of cascading timeouts and leaving me scrambling and stressed. This was a fairly complex problem to solve1, and one that I wracked my brain over for a good few days. However, the root of, and solutions to the problems, didn't come during the time spent sitting in-front of my computer, but instead during a 3 hour drive down the East Coast. No music, no podcast. Just me with my thoughts.
I've come to appreciate time spent with nothing but my thoughts. It's something I'd escaped for years. In the modern age it's so easy to always have some kind of entertainment streaming. I'd drive with a podcast playing, or do house chores with a YouTube video in the background. But something is lost in doing this. There's a reason that "the best thoughts come to you in the shower". And that's because we haven't figured out how to inject consumption into our showers gracefully (yet).
It turns out that complex problems, self-actualisation, and meaningful thoughts require time spent with oneself. This could be through journaling, meditation, or prayer. But I've found that so many other activities offer space for this. For over a year now I've exercised without headphones on. I've found that not only am I more focussed on my workouts (the actual movements, the mind-muscle connection, and pushing closer to my limits), but between sets my mind gets to wander. It allows me to plan my day, to consider problems I'm working on, and generally leads to a calmer, more collected me.
And so, one of my intentions for the year is to spend more quiet time with myself. This means not always listening to a podcast while driving. Or doing laundry and chores without any entertainment in the background. It means leaving my phone at home when I go to the beach or take a walk. And when I'm working on my crafts, not having anything playing that draws me out of the experience.
I like being in my head. And I feel the more time I spend with myself, the more I love me.
It turns out the issue was a combination of a massive bot network disrespecting robots.txt and trying to scrape every Bear blog, slow horizontal scaling (30 seconds), and some inefficient endpoints. This has been solved through more granular WAF rules, rate-limiting, better horizontal scaling tools, and more granular logging. As well as some efficiency cleanups on some endpoints.↩