HarborWire App Updates – Late June

During our off time, Kasey and I have been working very hard on updating the HarborWire app that many of you have downloaded and use.

We encourage the remaining 52% of you to load it on your phones. It gives you access to all the East Bay news, and yes, the commenting. We built this app for East Bay residents only, and you must have a local address for approval. Kasey, Jake, Todd, Mr. Gregory, and I can approve. Let us know on Channel 12 when you load the app.

Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to (technical talk incoming):

HarborWire Dev Update

Spent part of the weekend pushing another backend release. Nothing major on the surface, but this one cleans up a lot of technical debt and should make things feel a bit snappier around the app.

Feed & Performance

• Refactored feed generation to reduce redundant database queries.
• Expanded Redis caching for neighborhood timelines, lowering average API response times by roughly 30%.
• Optimized image processing and thumbnail generation, especially for older devices and slower connections.
• Tuned PostgreSQL indexes to improve feed loading and local search performance.

Notifications

• Reworked websocket subscriptions to improve live comment and reaction updates after reconnecting.
• Fixed an edge case where push notifications could occasionally arrive out of order.
• Added smarter retry logic when devices temporarily lose connectivity.

Infrastructure

• Improved API rate limiting to better handle automated traffic without affecting normal users.
• Added structured logging across backend services to make diagnosing production issues much easier.
• Cleaned up several background jobs and reduced overall resource usage during peak traffic.

Website Integration

• Improved cache invalidation for the public API that powers the East Bay website comment section. New public posts and edits should appear much more consistently without waiting for cache expiration.
• Made a few internal changes that should make future website integrations a little easier to maintain.

The Best Feature Ever

• Added support to HarborWire App for a new feature we affectionately call the Finch Delay™. HarborWire now introduces a four-minute delay before delivering notifications to Finch’s phone for Mrs. Johnson’s Free and reduced pie posts. This change was deemed necessary after reviewing historical acquisition metrics.

No further comment at this time.