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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

When I first announced Caddy, our website downloaded everything as .gz due to high traffic load -- a lesson I learned very quickly and a mistake I never made again.

This probably falls in the same boat. :)

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Sorry, maybe it's too early in the day but I don't get what the lesson was. Could you explain?

(IMHO) the lesson is that sometimes you're excited to tell the world about what you built, that you forget about some "other stuff"

i.e. I don't think that the authors of this tool wanted to have developers be forced to use the latest version of their tool.

It's probably that they didn't think about it when they wrote the code, but now they know and hopefully this gets fixed in the next release?

Yeah, exactly. A lot goes into shipping, and sometimes things like this can be overlooked, especially on a small team that needs to deliver broad platform support right out of the gate.

There are some bugs that are just hard to find until they're out there.

I just don't understand what the thing about "downloading everything as .gz" means. It's not like a gz is a rare file format, it seems like a totally reasonable format to download something in.

To clarify, every page load (.html file) was downloaded as a .gz file instead of being served as an HTML file and displayed as a web page in the browser.

Having once made a similar mistake myself, I assume what they mean is that it was downloading everything as a .gz—that is, the browser was asking users “where would you like to save index.html.gz?” instead of showing the homepage. (This happens when you precompress a static site for performance, but forget to tell the server that gzip should be negotiated as a Content-Encoding instead of a Content-Type.)

When we first release cdnjs.com we used tools to check if the DNS had fully propagated... but it hadn't. The shame of a cdn being down in several places across the globe.

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