This week, we shipped a little bug which many of you noticed. We were pretty excited in the wake of magic links last week. So we decided to clean up some of the environment variables surrounding the cron jobs which send you emails. We ended up being a little overzealous. The Dynah question reminder emails everyone got on Monday were broken. Oops.
It was a small mistake as these things go. No data was lost or destroyed. There wasn't a security vulnerability. But it was a mistake we emailed to everyone who uses Dynah, and that's embarrassing. We fixed the problem within a few hours and sent out updated reminders — with an apology — on Monday afternoon. Thank you to everyone who pointed out the problem on Slack and via email. And thank you for bearing with us while we fixed it.
We're making some improvements to make this sort of mistake harder to make. We don't want to make the same mistake twice — better to make new mistakes! But we are going to make mistakes from time to time. We're a small team trying to ship a big product with a lot of features. That means constant tradeoffs to keep improving. If we never made this sort of mistake, we're not taking the right sorts of risk.
That doesn't mean we're being reckless. We have good backups, and solid security processes. We work hard to avoid mistakes we can't fix. But we also want to give you the new features you need quickly and efficiently. And that means taking the right process risks here and there, even if sometimes it means a contrite email on Monday afternoon to make up for an embarrassing email on Monday morning.
We didn't just break and fix things this week. We also shipped an improvement to the way we calculate scores in the app. Each person's score now excludes questions which don't apply to them. This is a modest improvement to your calculations, but it should get you to higher scores faster. You might not notice this change immediately. The more members of your team answer more questions, the more effective this improvement will be.
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