Techrights' Architecture
Some of our team are writers, some are coders, some are neither
Architecturally, this site is simple. It has run on the same Debian system since around the time I last rebooted my laptop, as my writing system's uptime is surprisingly reassuring:
uptime 08:57:48 up 795 days, 1:09, 3 users, load average: 7.49, 7.23, 7.09
Less than 5 more days until 800 days.
For many years Techrights has been run by a team of people. The Techrights community goes two decades back and I'm the most prolific author (or person entrusted to deal with whistleblowers; I was brought in because back in 2006 I already had some reputation in the community, e.g. via USENET and Digg). The current SSG was developed by Techrights volunteers in the Free software community, who continue to maintain the system and the software so that me and others can carry on studying leaks and prepare articles. Just because we never name some people doesn't know they don't exist or never participate. They spare themselves the slog, the mobbing, sometimes the blackmail.
Over Git we collaborate on the site's direction; over IRC there's a lot of communication. The SSG is written primarily in Perl, which I never coded it from scratch. The IRC system relies on Ergo as the ircd (daemon) and the back-end Apache is not particularly interesting because we don't use very advanced features of it.
Stability is the main goal. Simplicity begets stability (when Shane started things he had chosen vanilla WordPress). Last year our uptime was around 99.99% or higher. We could never get anywhere near that with WordPress. █
Image source: Grotto at Villa di Papa Giulio, Rome