
Ask HN: I really need your help (resolved) - teej
Hacker News -<p>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.<p>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.<p>And I need to get it fixed -tonight-.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I can be contacted at teej.murphy@gmail.com or by phone (410) 236 - 2894<p>EDIT:  This is now resolved! Thanks for your help, HN.  You guys are the best.
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teej
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.

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polymatter
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.

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

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tuananh
people like you make me love HackerNews even more

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

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

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TheOnly92
His saying that the backend is crashing.

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

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WALoeIII
Aman Gupta.

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itmag
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.

~~~
itmag
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.

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mkopinsky
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.

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soho33
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.

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chris_dcosta
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.

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veverkap
Francis Cianfrocca

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

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vog
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.

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

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beagle3
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/>

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beagle3
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.

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jinfiesto
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.

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Jugglernaut
More to the point the topic wasn't really about obscure bugs in ruby. The
backend was failing due to getting slammed which admittedly could make some
nasty bugs surface.

What I think the main problem was is that you answered someone in an emergency
with a probably unrelated blog link.

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beagle3
> The backend was failing due to getting slammed

The original description was "server is crashing without leaving a trace",
which sounds like an obscure bug to me -- certainly of the kind described in
the article I linked to. It's as related as it can be given the info they gave
when they originally posted their query.

