"It's Time to Take Things Up a Notch: Join The Silph Research Group (and Check Out Silph DevOps!)"

#PokemonGO: Hey travelers,The Nest Atlas has been growing spectacularly. Travelers have found nests all over the world - including in some pretty cool locations we wouldn't expect. Here's a few stats for your enjoyment:Suspected Nesting Locations Identified: 23,237Nest Confirmation/Refutation Reports: 21,005That's amazing. Stay tuned for the public Nest Atlas, where you'll be able to see all species at once and employ awesome filters. We're working out a few issues with mapping that many datapoints, but we're close and can't wait to get it in your hands.That's not what we want to talk about today, though. Today we want to talk about science and tech.The Silph Research Group: ReorganizedNow that the Nest Atlas is humming along, we can finally focus on producing organized, high-quality research, improving our existing tools and resources, and creating new ones.Consequently, we're issuing a call for researchers!If you are interested in joining an active research group engaged in analyzing the mechanics of Pokemon GO, then we invite you to apply for the Silph Research Group.This group runs experiments to test popular or emerging theories - but does so with larger, better datasets, more controlled conditions, and more sets of eyes! Think of it as a peer reviewing body (or perhaps the Mythbusters of Pokemon GO?). The output of these experiments will be published (typically with the dataset and methodology broken down) on TheSilphRoad.com and published around the internet to help illuminate the greater GO community about the workings of the game.If that sounds like something you are interested in (and you can commit a few minutes and data every day or so), then apply here:Silph Research Group Application »So Why Did the Site Go Down Earlier?The web app is very resilient to large traffic spikes at this point. But about 12 hours ago, the site ground to a stop under an unusually large traffic spike (due to TRNRTips' YouTube channel highlighting the Nest Atlas).If you're curious exactly what happened, we've posted a post-mortem with all the technical details and what we learned from it here:http://ift.tt/2bQltpS brings us to another cool thing - http://blog.silph.io !We're fortunate to have a very gifted DevOps volunteer working with the Silph team to help us scale our infrastructure for the huge load the web app can be under at any given time. His name is Marco Ceppi and we all owe him a huge round of applause for the many miracles he continues to work for the Road.Check out his posts about working on the Silph project and the scaling issues we're facing at any given moment.Finally, we wanted to share an awesome monitoring dashboard with you all! If you are ever curious whether your internet connection is slow or the web app is the problem, you can now find out:The Silph Road Server Status Dashboard »^ This dashboard shows all sorts of awesome real-time stats about the health of our servers. We'll soon be adding it to our subreddit's sidebar for quick reference. Read more about the dashboard here.Parting WordsWe have a lot of new things in the works, travelers.Our /research section is going to be gaining all sorts of new and improved tools and resources. We'll also be rolling out some new things to help prevent information loss from Reddit's algorithms moving valuable posts into the oblivion. And we haven't even mentioned the native apps we're working hard on... Stay tuned!Travel safe,- The Silph Executives - via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2bBpDnP