TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

Discuss Spyderco's products and history.
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eRoc
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#221

Post by eRoc »

jimmyjohnjohn wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 9:55 am
I appreciate the responses and will respectfully address them. I think everyone who responded are not accounting for some challenges which must be overcome in order to have a relatively successful release online release.

It doesn't matter if sprints and exclusives are new or not. A resilient system capable of handling load spikes 6 to 9 orders of magnitude from the mean will still be difficult to implement successfully and the fact that exclusives have existed for a period of time does not suddenly lessen that engineering challenge. The demand, apparently, is that this vendor should engineer a resilient system capable of handling spikes in usage that are 6 to 9 orders or magnitude higher than average that occur 0.0002 of the time. It is certainly possible to design and build such a system, but the cost to do so will quickly go parabolic, which is what you seem to demand the vendor implement in rather cavalier fashion. Again, I create distributed, scalable systems for Fortune 100 companies because they are the only ones who can afford it. Just to get your foot in the door is high 6 figures and these projects can easily reach 7, 8, 9, even 10 figures.

eRoc, what would happen to your environment if, for 0.0002 of the year, your load spiked by a million times where you were flooded with requests competing for read/write access to a single database record? Is your system designed for that? I can go on describing the process, but unless the system is designed to scale and ensure system state is protected, things will get messy quickly and the entire system may become unusable. Designing a system to handle the load that will be experienced 0.0002 of the time is a very costly proposition for a company and is completely outside the realm of expertise for a knife shop. It can be done, as you know, but it's expensive and it's always going to be difficult.

Cloudflare is a content distribution network. There is no way that Cloudflare alone would solve the problems that the vendor experienced. I don't want to be too critical but that shows a lack of understanding about the problem.
It happens, but if I know in advance I can prepare for it. In my environment I handle this through hardware, software, or just plain communication(staged releases for various social networks/geographic regions). But I'm monitoring traffic before expected peak times, working with staff to monitor social media traffic(where they're advertising). I didn't say this wasn't difficult and/or not expensive, what I was trying to say is specifically with website traffic it shouldn't be unexpected or incapable of being planned for. If a company is launching a product and hyping it through social media, you should be actively preparing for high traffic. This is what you're trying to set up, so be prepared. It's not a good business practice to set customers up for failure. I could have looked at social media traffic, pre-order traffic, etc. etc. and increased by "x" percent to get a ballpark figure of estimated traffic. Now whether you want to or can do anything about it is a different story.

I don't really care how he runs his business or website. I got in on the 2nd pre-order no website issues at all. Maybe he could have continued with random drops, have a lottery system, email sign up, raise the price of the dang knife. Sometime you have to get creative.

Managing supply and demand has been a job since....thousands of years before websites. People are always going to complain, but if you set up customers for failure, the chances of them returning for business drops significantly. I didn't have a problem so I'll be back, but others obviously feel differently.
Last edited by eRoc on Fri Feb 07, 2020 11:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
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jdw
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#222

Post by jdw »

I think that TKJ had the set up rigged before the drop. It is very weird how many are circulating on the secondary market for extremely inflated prices. You guys are dancing on the head of a pin. And I respect your content expertise.
Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life.
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jimmyjohnjohn
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#223

Post by jimmyjohnjohn »

eRoc wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 10:58 am
I didn't say this wasn't difficult and/or not expensive, what I was trying to say is specifically with website traffic it shouldn't be unexpected or incapable of being planned for. If a company is launching a product and hyping it through social media, you should be actively preparing for high traffic. This is what you're trying to set up, so be prepared. It's not a good business practice to set customers up for failure.

Roger that, I hear ya. What if your backend architecture that you already paid for and implemented is tightly coupled with no provision to scale horizontally and and no separate queuing service to handle the flood of requests as you get slammed? The architecture for normal loads is drastically different than that which would be needed to process load spikes which are 6-8 orders of magnitude greater than normal. Suddenly you're faced with having to re-architect your entire backend, which is a huge expenditure. I agree that this is not good for the business or its customers but it's still a difficult thing to plan for, no matter who you are. The recent debut of Disney+ experienced its own problems on launch day. I guess my point is that there is no magic wand to make this problem going away and others saying, "They should have known," does not solve the problem at all.

eRoc wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 10:58 am
Sometime you have to get creative.

Managing supply and demand has been a job since....thousands of years before websites. People are always going to complain, but if you set up customers for failure, the chances of them returning for business drops significantly. I didn't have a problem so I'll be back, but others obviously feel differently.

I agree on all points. Personally, I understand the limitations of service providers and try to work within those limitations, understanding that no one and no thing is perfect.
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#224

Post by jimmyjohnjohn »

jdw wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 11:23 am
You guys are dancing on the head of a pin.

Being detail-oriented is part of our job in this industry. Having worked in the financial services industry before, every penny in millions of calculations and transactions had to be accounted for. When I write 10,000 lines of code, one incorrect character can introduce a bug that can cause severe problems and be very costly to fix somewhere down the line. Or if I architect a system incorrectly for a customer's needs, as we see in this thread. So attention to detail and understanding what's involved does matter.

jdw wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 11:23 am
And I respect your content expertise.

Thanks much. We are all experts somewhere on something, I think. :)
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#225

Post by Blacksprucy »

jdw wrote:
Thu Feb 06, 2020 10:48 am
It's really hard to give someone the benefit of the doubt when you see a drop unfold the way that this one did. I think that it is short sighted for people to think that all of the frustration is about missing a knife. Nobody wants to feel like the process that they are participating in is rigged or unfair. This one still appears to me, and apparently others, to have been both.

There is no such thing as "fair" in a seller's market.
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eRoc
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#226

Post by eRoc »

jimmyjohnjohn wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 11:46 am
The recent debut of Disney+ experienced its own problems on launch day. I guess my point is that there is no magic wand to make this problem going away and others saying, "They should have known," does not solve the problem at all.
To put my argument simply, I as a solitary admin would not launch a Disney+ service. I would probably test selling DVD's first (or whatever the comparable argument might be). My argument isn't "they should have known", it's that managing website traffic isn't black magic or witchcraft.

Raise the price of the knife by $10,000, bam, I've solved your website traffic issue. Sys admin job done, I deserve a beer. :D



Edit: My arguments/discussion may be misinterpreted. My issues with these knife websites have more to do with the website host/vendor than the company. Likely these vendors are hosting 100's of small businesses and don't work with them as closely as they should. Likely being told "yeah yeah we can handle the traffic" and then it falls on it's face.
Last edited by eRoc on Fri Feb 07, 2020 12:20 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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jdw
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#227

Post by jdw »

jimmyjohnjohn wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 11:57 am
jdw wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 11:23 am
You guys are dancing on the head of a pin.

Being detail-oriented is part of our job in this industry. Having worked in the financial services industry before, every penny in millions of calculations and transactions had to be accounted for. When I write 10,000 lines of code, one incorrect character can introduce a bug that can cause severe problems and be very costly to fix somewhere down the line. Or if I architect a system incorrectly for a customer's needs, as we see in this thread. So attention to detail and understanding what's involved does matter.

jdw wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 11:23 am
And I respect your content expertise.

Thanks much. We are all experts somewhere on something, I think. :)

Some are more focused on code than life. But I do too. :)
Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life.
--Wovoka
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jimmyjohnjohn
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#228

Post by jimmyjohnjohn »

eRoc wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 12:11 pm
Raise the price of the knife by $10,000, bam, I've solved your website traffic issue. Sys admin job done, I deserve a beer. :D

I think this is tangential but very much related. I respect what Spyderco does very much. Sal's ethos and his principles permeate Spyderco as a business. There is much more demand for these sprint runs than supply so this skews the street price upwards quite a bit. Increasing the price of sprints by 50% or more would quell the frenzy during a release but that would not pass the smell test with regard to Spyderco's sense of what's right, which I understand. The other options would be to increase the sprint run volume by 3 to 10 times, but that is probably not possible for several reasons (production capacity, source material quantity limitations, quality control, etc).

I can also understand why the incredible demand for Spyderco sprints exist. When I look around for knives made in steels that I like, Spyderco is the only manufacturer making knives from these premium steels in designs which are elegant in their simplicity and also very functional. That's why they're so desirable; no one else is making anything like it.
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#229

Post by JMM »

jimmyjohnjohn wrote:
Fri Feb 07, 2020 9:55 am
I appreciate the responses and will respectfully address them. I think everyone who responded are not accounting for some challenges which must be overcome in order to have a relatively successful release online release.

It doesn't matter if sprints and exclusives are new or not. A resilient system capable of handling load spikes 6 to 9 orders of magnitude from the mean will still be difficult to implement successfully and the fact that exclusives have existed for a period of time does not suddenly lessen that engineering challenge. The demand, apparently, is that this vendor should engineer a resilient system capable of handling spikes in usage that are 6 to 9 orders or magnitude higher than average that occur 0.0002 of the time. It is certainly possible to design and build such a system, but the cost to do so will quickly go parabolic, which is what you seem to demand the vendor implement in rather cavalier fashion. Again, I create distributed, scalable systems for Fortune 100 companies because they are the only ones who can afford it. Just to get your foot in the door is high 6 figures and these projects can easily reach 7, 8, 9, even 10 figures.

eRoc, what would happen to your environment if, for 0.0002 of the year, your load spiked by a million times where you were flooded with requests competing for read/write access to a single database record? Is your system designed for that? I can go on describing the process, but unless the system is designed to scale and ensure system state is protected, things will get messy quickly and the entire system may become unusable. Designing a system to handle the load that will be experienced 0.0002 of the time is a very costly proposition for a company and is completely outside the realm of expertise for a knife shop. It can be done, as you know, but it's expensive and it's always going to be difficult.

Cloudflare is a content distribution network. There is no way that Cloudflare alone would solve the problems that the vendor experienced. I don't want to be too critical but that shows a lack of understanding about the problem.
Actually Coudflare does a whole lot more than being a CDN, they help customers do any number of services like security, DDoS protection, dynamic performance scaling, DNS, NTP.... I'm not a web guy, but I am a (retired) network engineer, and I can assure you they can do everything that guy needs and more. ;)

Cheers,

John
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jimmyjohnjohn
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#230

Post by jimmyjohnjohn »

No. Cloudflare is a very good reverse proxy. AWS, Azure, et al offer many other services to host your entire stack and automatically scale based upon demand in real-time, which is what's needed here if you want to get away from your generic ShoppingCarts'R'Us.com that can't handle the load during a sprint's release.

For example, where do your backend services and data live? Cloudflare doesn't have the equivalent of AWS Relational Data Service or Amazon Container Service and so forth for my application where business logic processes customer orders and the system state persists.
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#231

Post by JMM »

Cool bro, I'm not interested in an argument, I've worked with them for years, do some googling.

Cheers,

John
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jimmyjohnjohn
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#232

Post by jimmyjohnjohn »

Here is a Cloudflare employee describing their data store, saying that it is designed for frequent and fast reads, but not frequent writes. A data store during a sprint run is going to be hammered both ways, needing to be able to handle both frequent reads and writes with a queue in front of the data processing layer.

"KV is generally designed for situations where you are writing relatively infrequently."

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/work ... cy/37107/3

This stuff matters when you're taking someone else's money and promising to build them something. This is how companies like Knife Joker get into trouble, by listening to people promise them one thing when it's not really true, especially for their use case.
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#233

Post by JMM »

Yep, while I understand there public/private/govt'/leo portfolios are all different, I'd be happy to set you up with an inside sales channel rep if you'd like. :)

Cheers,

John
infinkc
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#234

Post by infinkc »

Didn’t see it posted, but this re-released now with all dlc liners.

https://www.theknifejoker.com/product/s ... m-cruwear/
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#235

Post by Mrj »

Thanks Travis for restocking this awesome knife. Plus do a para 3 in this rendition.
MRj “Weak things break!”
#0048
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kennethsime
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#236

Post by kennethsime »

Ooph. That is a killer knife combo. If I needed another Shaman, this might be it.
I'm happiest with Micarta and Tool Steel.

Top four in rotation: K390 + GCM PM2, ZCarta Shaman, Crucarta PM2, K390 + GCM Straight Spine Stretch.
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#237

Post by buckleys »

Image

Finally got mine. Interesting the Cruwear one has a slightly lighter green g10 than the 204p one. Either that, or my hand oils have darkened the G10 a ton, but I don't think so.
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#238

Post by GarageBoy »

Back in stock again

Surprised these stayed in stock after what happened with the initial batch
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#239

Post by VipeX »

GarageBoy wrote:
Fri Oct 21, 2022 9:09 pm
Back in stock again

Surprised these stayed in stock after what happened with the initial batch
And their website says 181 in stock as of now.
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Re: TKJ Spyderco exclusive cruwear ????

#240

Post by Ranger_Ike »

buckleys wrote:
Thu Oct 13, 2022 2:14 pm
Image

Finally got mine. Interesting the Cruwear one has a slightly lighter green g10 than the 204p one. Either that, or my hand oils have darkened the G10 a ton, but I don't think so.
Looks really good! I like the lighter green. Thanks for the picture.
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