Recent downtime + plans for NativShark

November 4, 2023

I'd like to take a little break from our usual weekly program to chat about the bit of extended unplanned downtime our app had this week ^^

Before we go further,

申し訳ございませんでした。
We deeply apologize.

We're sorry if this affected your ability to study.

I woke up a bit later than usual on the day in question and started studying just as the servers went down, so I wasn't able to fulfill my morning routine. I know the pain as well :(

So what happened?

Well, to give some context, we're actually quite a small team.

We have a total of 5 full-time employees— all of course lifelong language learners.

We also have a small handful of contractors who help with various things such as content writing, planning, audio, support, and such

We're basically a cute local boutique-style study platform, everything is handmade with love by us!

So, right now, the only two devs on the team are on vacation.

Caleb and Chie are currently showing Caleb's parents around Japan. It's their first time visiting!

And they took time out of their vacation to come in and fix the issue… which was done between a 新幹線 (bullet train) ride and the lobby of a ホテル (hotel) in 京都 (Kyoto).

And before I let Caleb (CEO and lead dev) explain the whole situation, I want to thank everyone for being so patient.

There were many people both in the community and in the support box asking about why their studies weren't loading, and everyone was really nice and supportive when we explained what was going on.

We're very grateful to everyone who has ever sent us positive vibes. Thank you

Example of those positive vibes:

Alright, here's Caleb's announcement made in the NativShark community:

Hi everyone,

The NativShark app is back online ^^

https://app.nativshark.com/sign-in

Many apologies for the nearly 11 hour down time today

I know this was hugely disruptive to your studies

This has been the longest downtime in over 3 years of being online^^

So what happened??

Firstly, I'm on vacation, it's my parents' first time visiting Chie and I in Japan, this morning when it broke I had just woken up at our hotel, had bit of time for breakfast then had to run to Tokyo station to catch the Shinkansen to Kyoto.

I did a ton of debugging on the Shinkansen (thank goodness for 5G most of the way between Tokyo and Kyoto, way faster than the train wi-fi).

ANYWAY after all that, I uncovered that there was an issue with the server applications connection to the database server. So the app was up, and the database was up, but there was some kind of configuration problem.

I'm not sure why but Google Cloud decided to reboot my app clusters on its own and when it did, it restarted with the wrong image version. After I figured that out I just had to figure out which version to revert to and once I did we were back!

This definitely shouldn't have been able to happen, but alas, it did. This and many reasons is why I have been focusing my attention on rebuilding the app and the infrastructure so that it is far more robust and redundant. It will still be quite some time until we (Chie and I) are done with the re-work / rebuild but we will continue to do our best!!

Looking forward to this 1.0 tech behind us and one day living in the NativShark 2.0 world.

Until then, thank you for your understanding. Many apologies once again and best of luck on your continued studies!

Imma go show my parents the wonders of Kyoto now 👀

What is NativShark 2.0?

As we saw hints of above, the dev team (Caleb and Chie) are focused on rebuilding NativShark's systems into something more robust that will allow us to do a lot more of what we need to with the system.

To give a bit of a behind-the-scenes, this is something that is a very high priority for us for several reasons:

1. We'll be able to push out feature updates more frequently
2. The servers will be faster and more stable
3. Content will be smoother and easier for the content team to produce
4. We'll be able to rewrite and rework older content to match current-day standards

The first two are probably obvious benefits.

For #3, right now the content management platform is a bit of a struggle to use. So that needs rewriting.

Let's take a look at #4 now:

Content rework

This is something the team has been wanting to do for a while and is one of the big reasons for prompting our rework of the NativShark 1.0 system.

Because of how the system is set up, it's impossible to do the overhaul of Phase One content that we would like to do.

Wait, why do you want to rework Phase One?

Man, what well-timed questions I ask myself in these newsletters.

Simply put, Phase One is a great introduction to Japanese. I learned more than a few things from it and solidified my foundations even after having passed the JLPT N1 before I ever went through it.

In fact, from Phase One alone, you can learn more* Japanese than a university will teach you in 5 semesters.

*I say more because there's a lot of Japanese that universities never teach you because it's not "grammatically perfect". But it's used all the time in everyday life, and using exclusively "grammatically perfect" Japanese just makes you sound a bit weird/unnatural. It doesn't prepare you to comprehend what someone is saying to you in the wild, either.

That said, Phase One is not a great introduction to NativShark.

Phase Two and Three have a lot of depth that is hard to come across in most learning resources, but you'll have no idea what's waiting for you based on Phase One.

In fact, many people quit during Phase One and we have gotten feedback that it feels like it's only travel lessons or just a phrasebook that people can get elsewhere.

To be honest, that's understandable feedback.

But once a student reaches Phase Two and Three, they see that NativShark is so much more than that.

Don't take my word for it, take a peep at these lessons from Phase Three:

Japanese-style names for months

Casual っていう for unexpected conclusions

お笑い: Japanese comedy

The 古墳 (Kofun) period

I learned so much from these lessons. And these aren't really special by any means, they're just the ones I've done recently.

And that's not including all the vocab that comes with context (which is necessary to even begin to understand how Japanese is used in everyday life).

It also doesn't include how Dialogues at the end of Units are realistic Japanese conversations, with native audio (instead of slowed-down textbook audio).

Dialogue examples!
A conversation between a homestay student and a host mother

A conversation between a section chief and a subordinate

A conversation between friends

(If these are tough for you, these would be very simple to understand when you reach them in NativShark. Dialogues are review at the end of a Unit, so they're full of content you would already be familiar with and able to understand with enough presses of the Study Now button.)

You need an account to access the above links, by the way. You can create yours for free here if you don't have one yet:

Anyway, the problem is, you have to get through 166 Units to even begin to understand that.

So at a Unit a day, it takes about 5 months to begin to understand how fundamentally different of a system NativShark is.

Technically, a student could just click through about 180 Units and archive everything they see along the way… but that of course is not ideal ^^;

So we wanna rework it.

But we can't until the new system is done being developed.

And we'll be working on that as a team. The same way we all learned Japanese (or English, depending on the team member).

One step at a time.

Just keep swimming.

P.S. We're planning on having a pretty robust placement system once that rework comes in as well. So we'd be double-solving the above problem 👀

Weekly writing prompt:

You're meeting up with your friend but get there 30 minutes late. When you see them, you say…

This idea comes from a suggestion from Taylor in the community! Thanks for the idea Taylor~

Post your responses here and let's talk about them!

Feel free to ask for help if you want to say something specific as well. Both myself and other learners will be in there offering advice and help~

Submit prompts you want to see here.

Great job from everyone on last week's prompt^^

We saw lots of suggestions in there, including one where I felt it would be natural to add ~てくれる.

Here's a lesson on that!

神無月かんなづき (October)

I shared the link above but honestly, this lesson was so interesting it blew me away and I spent the next 20 minutes googling stuff in Japanese to learn more.

Turns out there actually is an 意味いみ (meaning) in going to a 神社じんじゃ (shrine) in October!

There is a 留守番るすばんをする神かみ (a deity who stays at the shrine) who will listen to your prayers in the main 神かみ's stead.

What's more interesting is that one of the 神かみ who does this is 恵比寿えびす様さま (Ebisu).

I have a feeling 恵比寿えびす came before the beer company with the same name.

On an unrelated note, this reminds me of how when I was getting started with Japanese, I had no idea how to type んな.

If you're using a qwerty keyboard, you'll have to hit "n" three times! Two for the ん and then one for the な. So it'll look like "nnna".

Hopefully that helps someone out there^^

If the above Japanese is difficult for you, all you need to do is keep hitting the Study Now button, and you'll understand it when you get there. Especially when using a study resource like NativShark, you'll be fine as long as you show up as much as you can. The above comes from a lesson in Phase Three, Unit 76.

NativShark goodie bag

You remember how I was telling you how the 2 devs were on vacation?

Well… so are the other 2 founders who do the content.

So for November, there will be no new Units released, and we'll start seeing new ones again in December.

No worries though, NativShark has a total of 645 Units released, so you're probably not going to catch up ^^

This means it's just Ivan and me right now so come keep us company in the community

Would be cool if you did the writing prompt this week as well, it's fun seeing people improve thanks to all the feedback and brainstorming we all do in there ^^

Hope to see you in there!

New Podcasts Episodes:

The Konnichiwa Podcast

Sushi and Halloween - Spotify

Good luck out there and happy studies,
Ty & the NativShark Team