on code.

Today, two months, after joining the 2dehands.be team, we released code on which I contributed a significant amount of code for the first time. Considered I’ve been learning Perl along the way, and my last experience with a reasonable high- traffic site was at fabchannel.com, it was thrilling to see a big change being pushed to the live servers, watching the logs as they scrolled by and monitoring the new change. It did feel like somewhat of a swan-song to me.

The change we just pushed has been a big change, as it directly touches the users who interact with our site. For years, 2dehands has been running after a “firewall” of captcha’s and smart anti-spam measurements without actually asking any sort of confirmation from our users, contrary to most sites, where user-interaction starts with password-confirmation.

Our intial barrier for using the website may have been raised by demanding e-mail confirmation, but I am convinced it’ll offer a better overall user-experience in the long run. Having confirmed users means we can slacken some of our anti-spam measurements, improve the quality of content and reach our users when we need to.

However, the most exiting part of this change was monitoring the live data, as it reflected the change: seeing registrations being confirmed as users clicked the links in their e-mail just seconds after the change went live.