happy friday! we skipped last week because jae was still in the middle of moving and we didn’t have much to report, but we’re back! (jae, unfortunately, still does not have any of their stuff. this is unfortunate for them because they would like to have a desk, and unfortunate for the rest of us because they keep complaining about not having a desk.)
as we talked about a few weeks ago, we’ve swapped places and jae is now full-time on cohost development, while colin is moving over to tipping and subscriptions once he wraps up what he’s currently working on. this means we’ve got some small things in while jae reacquaints themself with the cohost codebase.
here’s what’s new:
- more changes to improve loading time and user experience on the dashboard and notification pages.
- a notification page that loads notifications in the background, a redesigned notification API to support it, and a fresh new eggbug!
- dashboard cache pruning:
- each user’s dashboard cache currently keeps growing indefinitely. this was a natural way to design a system like this, and the caches of inactive users would get pruned entirely, so we didn’t think about this for a while.
- however, despite the fact that the data stored for each post is fairly small, this meant that as people keep posting users who stayed logged in would take up more and more of a common pool of cache memory.
- we are now running a daily background job to discard the cached data for posts that are more than 50 or so pages back on a user’s dashboard. you’ll still be able to read those posts, but they won’t be proactively kept around in the off chance you want to.
- the upshot: no more error messages and no more manually refreshing when the notification page is slow to load, and fewer slow loads on both of them.
- fixed a bug where a private page sharing its own post would not show up on its followers’ or its own dashboard.
- fixed some bugs with how post collapsing (the “read more” functionality) works by just throwing it all out and starting over.
- it makes much more sense now.
- we finished the rollout for the new post renderer and removed the remainder of the old code from the codebase.
that’s all for this week! thanks, as always, for using cohost 
