There are a number of things on Tindie that I have been unable to find anywhere else at any price. (Mostly small batch bespoke electronics.) I hope they figure this out.
They are putting out a lot of stuff that to me is very obvious to read between the lines what led to this because I've been brought in to clean messes like this before:
>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 major benefit to the site in the long run.
They are saying it was "spring cleaning" or a migration that took out the site for days. "infrastructure getting very fragile" reeks of bad or nonexistent ops practices, probably very little or unreliable IAC (if any, I've seen shops get by for 10+ years by just clicking things in console, til unfortunately it gets to this point).
This though, rubs me the wrong way:
> We want to offer a much better quality of service going foward. We understand that the lack of communication has been frustrating, and I have been closely watching social media and reporting the community's feelings up the chain, so your voices are being heard. The plan was not to have a long outage like this, but due to factors beyond the dev team's control, things have taken much longer than anticipated. Please be patient with us - I will keep updating here and on our other social media.
"Factors beyond the dev teams control." Sorry, no. If you have an ops team, you don't get to toss blame over the wall like that, and if you don't, you have no one to blame but yourselves. I feel bad for whoever the unofficial official ops dude is right now. These kind of infrastructure "tech debt" woopsies come from years of people just not giving a crap to doing things properly, it's never seen as important until it suddenly is. Hope they learn a lesson and hire an infrastructure guy properly. There's long been a persistent delusion in the pure dev world that they should be able to be completely agnostic to the hardware lying underneath their beautiful code - ideally yes, in practice almost never, unless you come from a place that has the significant resources to make something nice like that, or are willing to pay out the azz for managed cloud services or licenses.
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 mails asking me to start selling my designs with China-based outlets: they would make the PCBs, assemble them, and pay me some money for every item sold.
About Sunday/Monday last week right before it went down I noticed the site was supper buggy and failing to add things to cart, I emailed support and got a "we are checking the issue". Since it went down all I've heard from support is "Please be patient. Tindie will be back up soon as we are currently performing maintenance. At this time, we do not have an estimated timeframe to provide."
The fact that it wasn't communicated at all prior and not having a timeframe makes me thing this was probably an ops screw up.
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.
Yeah this sucks, I have a bunch of hobbyist orders stuck in limbo since last week -- customers have paid, but I can't pull the orders down even through the API.
I really like Tindie as a platform and have been using it since nearly the beginning...but I'd have lost the contract if I pulled this level of nonsense on a customer's production application.
> 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 major benefit to the site in the long run.
If I were a developer there I would be feeling really not very good. Just minutes of downtime on the systems I’ve worked on gets my heart rate going.
It also feels like there’s a lot being left unsaid in this statement. Normally you would work on these things in parallel to production… so something is seriously wrong.
Glad I used a privacy.com burner when I bought from them. Quite a while later I found a declined purchased for pizza on the now long-deactivated burner card I used to purchase through them.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 57.2 ms ] threadEdit: https://hackaday.social/@tindie/116427447318102919
https://hackaday.social/@tindie/116436988752373293
>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 major benefit to the site in the long run.
They are saying it was "spring cleaning" or a migration that took out the site for days. "infrastructure getting very fragile" reeks of bad or nonexistent ops practices, probably very little or unreliable IAC (if any, I've seen shops get by for 10+ years by just clicking things in console, til unfortunately it gets to this point).
This though, rubs me the wrong way:
> We want to offer a much better quality of service going foward. We understand that the lack of communication has been frustrating, and I have been closely watching social media and reporting the community's feelings up the chain, so your voices are being heard. The plan was not to have a long outage like this, but due to factors beyond the dev team's control, things have taken much longer than anticipated. Please be patient with us - I will keep updating here and on our other social media.
"Factors beyond the dev teams control." Sorry, no. If you have an ops team, you don't get to toss blame over the wall like that, and if you don't, you have no one to blame but yourselves. I feel bad for whoever the unofficial official ops dude is right now. These kind of infrastructure "tech debt" woopsies come from years of people just not giving a crap to doing things properly, it's never seen as important until it suddenly is. Hope they learn a lesson and hire an infrastructure guy properly. There's long been a persistent delusion in the pure dev world that they should be able to be completely agnostic to the hardware lying underneath their beautiful code - ideally yes, in practice almost never, unless you come from a place that has the significant resources to make something nice like that, or are willing to pay out the azz for managed cloud services or licenses.
Before the tariffs, I noticed that Chinese companies were trying to undercut them. I've gotten multiple mails asking me to start selling my designs with China-based outlets: they would make the PCBs, assemble them, and pay me some money for every item sold.
https://colonelpanic.tech/#products
The fact that it wasn't communicated at all prior and not having a timeframe makes me thing this was probably an ops screw up.
However, any downtime over an hour or two screams "migration gone wrong" to me.
Otherwise wouldn't you just roll back to get the site up to come back at it and try again later?
I really like Tindie as a platform and have been using it since nearly the beginning...but I'd have lost the contract if I pulled this level of nonsense on a customer's production application.
If I were a developer there I would be feeling really not very good. Just minutes of downtime on the systems I’ve worked on gets my heart rate going.
It also feels like there’s a lot being left unsaid in this statement. Normally you would work on these things in parallel to production… so something is seriously wrong.
And I very well remember when Rackspace took down their object storage for weeks in their London zone, because they ran out of hard drives.
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.
Either that or catastrophic data issues?
Otherwise so much downtime at once is pretty crazy