HackThisSite.org News: What's been going on?

It's been a while since our last Staff Blog post, so we figure it's time to throw out some updates.

• Development Environment - We've brought on a couple new developers who have a relatively large amount of experience and insight into DevOps-styled development workflows. With their assistance, we've begun deploying Phabricator and other systems to have a Development -> Staging -> Production rollout workflow. It's coming along quite nicely, actually.


• Bug Fixes/Code Changes - We're finally getting to the point that we can again have a seamless deployment schedule to fix the large number of bugs, exploits, and stagnant features that need upgraded or added. With this will come new missions and new website features, two things we admit HackThisSite desperately needs.


• High-Availability - Look at the bottom of the website and you'll notice something that says

  Web Node: wwwN

  Where N is the node you're currently connected to. Due to the fact that our code is heavily reliant on Apache, and that Apache downright sucks as a web server, we implemented a load-balancing system that dynamically uses three to five web nodes depending on the traffic load. The system is backed using cross-server network shares and a Memcached session store, allowing you to switch from node to node without being aware of it (usually, though, you will use the same node every time due to the IP-to-node mapping we employ). This and other HA systems also give us the ability to seamlessly upgrade the backend software running the site without a user ever noticing.


• Other New Systems - Various systems of ours -- advertising, radio, PBX, IRC, and others -- are getting refreshed and upgraded as time and technology allow, granting us the ability to deploy new features to HackThisSite.

We'll do our best to keep you, our community, informed of upcoming changes. As always, feel free to hop on our IRC and join the #comdev channel to ask any questions you may have. And, as always, we are looking for new staff to join our ranks in development and other capacities. If you're interested, shoot us an email (staff AT hack this site DOT org), or contact an admin on our IRC.