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Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days

tindie.com

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Re: Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days

#31

Unfortunate. Tindie is (was?) a pretty unique marketplace. Amusingly, a lot of what they were selling was probably illegal due to FCC rules: for the most part, you can't sell electronics without EMI certification and "I'm just a hobbyist" is not an excuse. Kits get a bit of leeway, but finished products don't. Before the tariffs, I noticed that Chinese companies were trying to undercut them. I've gotten multiple mail…

Free market is a good thing.

Every freedom has limits

Re: Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days

#32
post #21

Concerning, a professional development team should have been able to manage this switch with minimal to no downtime. Makes me wonder what other mistakes they're making. I'm reluctant to trust my payment information with them in the future.

So many fairly popular apps, SaaS, etc are on skeleton crew staffing-levels. It'll probably get worse with vibe coding. Though then they'll probably launch Claude Ops, etc now that I think about it.

Re: Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days

#34

Unfortunate. Tindie is (was?) a pretty unique marketplace. Amusingly, a lot of what they were selling was probably illegal due to FCC rules: for the most part, you can't sell electronics without EMI certification and "I'm just a hobbyist" is not an excuse. Kits get a bit of leeway, but finished products don't. Before the tariffs, I noticed that Chinese companies were trying to undercut them. I've gotten multiple mail…

Free market is a good thing.

Blind dogma is rarely a good thing. A free market is not a virtue or end goal in itself, but a means to other ends.

Re: Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days

#35
The site has been on life support for a decade, ownership has changed hands a few times, basic features promised 10 years ago never shipped, API is half implemented (eg. you can download an order but you cannot mark it shipped), and they still have no mechanism to collect state sales tax nor will they submit a 1090 as required by US tax law. I jumped ship 5 years ago when this became too much of a problem and not a single thing has changed in those 5 years.

Tindie was a great place for a hacker to sell a few widgets back in the day, but legal requirements have changed since then but Tindie has not changed a line of code in at least 10 years.

Re: Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The maker people I know have been migrating away from Tindie To what? The only alternative I know of is Lectronz.

Shopify, etsy, crowdsupply, a custom website. All have their problems, i’m not endorsing. I sell on tindie. Well, i don’t sell much there, but i list on tindie. Most of my sales come thru my own store site.

that just resolves back to the original problem that Tindie solved, discoverability.

It's like saying people are fleeing ebay for Shopify. Yeah, I guess -- but that only really solves the merchant sales problem.

I buy from indie elec shops directly when I can, but the problem is that I commonly discover those shops thru tindie. Word of mouth/discord/etc isn't nearly as a great a tool as a searchable refreshing index.

Re: Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days

#37
post #25

> The goal of the current maintenance is to fix a lot of long-standing issues with the site. The underlying infrastructure was getting very fragile as technical debt accumulated over time. A team is working very hard right now to make sure that once the site is back up, it's on much better footing and will be solid and reliable for the long term. Despite the unfortunate amount of time this is taking, it will be a maj…

The scenarios I have taken extended downtime for. When an OLTP's DB needed a serious overhaul for some reason and it was cheaper for rollout to plan operational downtime than risk loosing data or inconsistent transactions. Generational platform migration to complete system rewrites (something I am generally against, but that is its own soapbox). Migrating from on-prem to cloud infra, which required design changes. In all cases data integrity/consistency is the critical aspect. Migrating from one db technology to another (MySQL -> PostgreSQL).

In all those cases there is serious planning done before the migration, checklists, trial runs/validations, and validation procedures day off. If something isn't working, the leadership group evaluates the the issue and determines rollback vs go forward. Rollback needs to also be planned for, and your planned downtime window should be considered.

I agree with you, this wording implies they are making changes after this change. This could've been bad planning, a bad call day off, etc.

In one scenario, we _had_ to go forward while resolving several blockers on the fly. We had planned ahead of time developer rotation shifts. Pulling people off the line after 8-12hrs. At some point, you aren't thinking clearly understress. Don't know how big the team is over there is, but I hope they are pacing themselves, during what I am sure is a horrible moment of crisis to them.

My advice to them is, consider a roll back if needed/possible. Split responsibility between who is managing the process and dealing with specific problems. Focus on MVP. Don't try to _fix_ and replace at the same time, if something was broken before business wise, log it in your bug tracker and deal with it later. Pull people away if needed to get rest. Get upper management away from people doing the work, have them only talking to the group handling the process management.

Edit: I am also making a good faith assumption that this is planned and not an emergency response, either way, it doesn't change my general advice.

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