Patch Notes 2/14

Hey chat!

We're proud to be publishing our first Patch Notes blog. We wanted to create a way to talk to you guys about what we're working on as a company. Here, each department at Healthy Gamer will talk about what we're up to every week or so.

We want to take this journey of developing resources and access to mental wellness as a community, not in a bubble.

Our community is always going to be our guiding star, you guys are all the main characters that we aim to support. Feedback on the notes on Reddit, Discord, or Twitter are important to us and always taken into account.

-Ryan, Director of Growth

Community

Hi, I'm Kabir aka TechTeller on the HG discord/subreddit. Here's what our community was up to in the week of 2/7 - 2/13!

• The Healthy Gamer Discord is doing a dopamine detox throughout February! We had 600 people turn up for the first workshop! Tune in to our discord every Friday at 11 AM CT for the dopamine detox workshop, run by a Healthy Gamer Coach.
• frozen.forest reached a very important milestone in their journey. Super proud of everyone in our community making progress day to day!

• Our subreddit has been setting intentions every week and reaching their goals! Here are my favorite ones:

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Product

Hey there, I’m Brandon - Product Manager for Healthy Gamer. With 2021 behind us, I wanted to share some of the plans that the Product team here at Healthy Gamer are working on.

Dev

Hey there, I’m Jean-Paul (Tipuch) - Dev lead for Healthy Gamer.

We've been working on transitioning database systems, from MongoDB to Postgres, for the past couple of months. We chose MongoDB for a few reasons:

• It is a schemaless database so we could prototype and iterate very quickly on changes to our data models.
• It has good tooling and integration with Ruby on Rails.
• Some of our team members had experience with it.

We decided to switch from Mongo to Postgres after a decent amount of deliberation for the following reasons:

• We had more and more connected models and Mongo is decent with independent collections with embedded documents but started to be ill suited to our use case as the product developed.
• Mongo's cross collection queries have really poor performance and started to hit us on a couple spots in the codebase.
• Postgres's popularity and standard SQL functionalities makes it easier for us to find directly compatible tools for it.
• Active Record which is Ruby on rails default ORM library natively supports Postgres.
• We have had bugs with the Mongoid driver for Ruby on Rails when upgrading its minor versions.

So we've decided to make the switch. The transition hasn't been easy but so far, seeing the performance increase and the ease of use with third party tooling, I feel like it's been worth it. Some issues we've run into:

• Since we're transitioning, we need to do it progressively, with an equivalent database schema in Postgres, historical migration of data and eventually writing to both databases in real time and making sure the data looks consistent in both database systems.
• We have around a thousand automated tests (and about 70 thousand lines of code) and we have had to adapt those to the changes of the migration
• The Mongoid ORM and the Active Query ORM look very similar from afar but in reality work quite differently semantically, it has been a challenge to recognize those differences when the methods are named the same but behave in vastly different ways.

In conclusion, it's been quite tiring but very much worth it. I believe Postgres to be one of the best database systems at present, it's been there for a long long time and continues to be at the forefront of features, performance, and usability.

Leveraging managed cloud services for it is simple and we can easily integrate it within our infrastructure.

Coaching

Hey, I'm Dragon, coach admin at Healthy Gamer! This has been an awesome year on the coaching side of things. Thanks to you guys, the program has continued to grow. We've now helped over 10,000 people!

To create more opportunities for coaches and to reach even more clients, we're planning on hiring around 50 more coaches this year. That's nearly double our current amount of coaches!

We're also improving the quality of the curriculum, to make sure coaches are prepared to provide the best support possible! Our team has been hard at work recording a more cohesive and in-depth program to really prepare our new coaches. Here's a bts shot of the process: 

From our CEO, Kruti

• It’s really quite an honor to be able to communicate with you in this way. When we started Healthy Gamer, it was our way of tackling the alarming trends of declining mental health in the gaming community. Here we are 2.5 years later, with a real team building a subclinical mental health ecosystem made for and by our community.
• What made me want to build Healthy Gamer was that it was everything I wanted to do to effect change in healthcare. People, not patients or users. Satisfaction, not bill codes. Quick and transparent, not mired in outdated systems. Accountability for a good experience, not hours in waiting rooms. Affordable. Inclusive.
• The biggest surprise of my life is leading something with so many thoughtful people really wanting to make this thing better. The ownership this community takes for this whole project of AOE Healing is nothing short of inspiring. We are a small business tackling a huge problem in a very complicated landscape, so your insight is invaluable. I’m so proud of this team’s implementation, our ability to quickly identify problems and create timely solutions, and our transparency into why/how/what we are doing what we do.

To more AOE -

xx

KK

Tune in every week for updates plus some fun exclusive content!