Marcin and I strongly believe in transparency and openness. At RhodeCode we even put them into the DNA of the product (open source software) and the company (core principles). Our communication is also guided by being as informative, open and transparent as possible and so we thought about what could follow these principles but could still be so interesting that we by ourselves would read it.
And as you already saw it in the title, it’s a weekly digest of what we did like an internal diary made public. We see it as a test and will write it for the next 4 weeks. After that we check, together with you!, if the posts were interesting enough or just boring. So, enough introduction, let’s start and please share your feedback with us.
Servers, Release & Asana
Last Friday, we ordered more RhodeCode servers to keep up with the private beta users. Marcin wrote some automation to more quickly set them up and I think he will soon introduce Salt Stack, too. In a former company we worked a lot with Salt and really fell in love with its simplicity and power to even manage a zoo of hundreds of servers. Marcin even held a presentation at a Python conference in Poland about it and people shared our excitement.
On Monday, we decided about our release date and it will be around the 15th of July. On our Asana task lists for everything that needs to be done before the release (oh, wait just one week left?!) we have the following points:
- improved user dashboard (server URL, state, chosen plan & left seats)
- MVP website (home, contact / about, pricing, terms, features)
- save a chosen plan in a user object
- billing functionality (if there is time left …)
- change password functionality
- prepare press kit
- invite bloggers
Website, Pricing, Blogs
Especially on the texts and the website we worked this week a lot and I took some extra time on the responsive design since more than 15% of our page visitors come from mobile devices. For the website texts we collected existing features and described them, grouped them by user benefit and category and I am really looking forward to see this huge list on the website.
On Tuesday, we discussed our current pricing plans and included our learnings from the current private beta. Our entry level plan will now cost $20 and include an own server, 3 seats and unlimited Git & Mercurial repositories. We will offer a 15-day trial of course.
We also started now to actively scan the web for any mentionings of "RhodeCode" and we use the service Mention for this. Its like a better Google Alert and already unveiled some great blog posts about us (thanks!).
UI & Feedback
On Wednesday evening, I coded the password-forgotten functionality and moved our server uptime checks from Pingdom to Nodeping because Pingdom gets super expensive if you need many checks.
The whole week we continued our tasks on "making-RhodeCode-better-looking" and replaced the old icons with new icons by Fontawesome and improved the general layout, style and readability of content inside the RhodeCode SCM web app. Thanks to all who already sent praise about that, it seems especially in Japan people like the new style :)
This week, I also saw a strong increase in private beta feedback and support emails and am very thankful for that. It's such a great feeling to hear back from you guys, in the end that’s the reason why we work here so hard (sounds lame, but it’s true). So thanks again!
Next week will be a tough one, we need to finish the website - or at least the very basic version of it - and add some convenience functionality for users and actually start with doing bloggers. Oh and this credit card thing, I need to see if we can squeeze that in.
Please continue sending us feedback and I would love to also hear your opinions about this kind of blog post. Thanks!
Sebastian