Wildbit

It’s time to expand our team with another person to work on the design and front-end development of our products, Beanstalk and Postmark. We are looking for someone who has the experience and desire to nourish, improve and grow our two products and a few smaller satellite projects. You should be able to do a [...]

I’m so, so excited to show a project Chris and I have been working on for 6 months. As part of our office redesign we wanted to hang some artwork in our entryway. When you get off the elevator we wanted to show off something personal about Wildbit. Our first instinct was to work with [...]

The term of a vendor contract is something that we take for granted. In enterprise products, a 12 month term is pretty common. In SaaS we are used to month to month. In the past year, I’ve had some bitter experiences with long term contracts. The experience has been enlightening for me.
There is something [...]

So yesterday there was a shitstorm and it affected one of our largest competitors. All the stuff aside, I was most baffled by how some other companies in our field behaved themselves.
We’ve been doing this a long time, 13 years as a company, 8 years since launching our first product. There’s this rule, this gentleman’s [...]

We are hiring a developer to help grow and improve Beanstalk, our version control and deployments service. We’re looking for someone with at least three years of experience in supporting large scale production rails applications. In addition to clean, readable code, a focus on automated testing, refactoring, and documentation is crucial. Since Beanstalk is highly [...]

Recently while redesigning one of Beanstalk’s pages I had an interesting problem to solve. I had a few blocks which I wanted to highlight as a result of user’s action. The most natural way to do this is with CSS transitions and a bit of JavaScript:
.box-to-illuminate {
background-color: yellow;
[...]

It’s that time of year again. We just returned from our twice-annual retreat, this time in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. We seem to be drawn to Spain, the last two retreats being in Barcelona and Malaga. For this trip we chose a beach vacation in a beautiful house on the water to plan the next [...]

Backups are a critical aspect of any business. We use mongodb to store JSON documents generated by Postmark. This data changes frequently, so naturally it gets backed up on a regular basis.  I recently set out to restructure our mongodb backups, which previously we strictly used mongodump to perform routine backups. Unfortunately [...]

It’s been over 6 months since we moved into our office in Old City, Philadelphia. Our office is beautiful, and as our team has grown we’ve loved having an official headquarters, but we’re software design experts – not office design experts.
The folks at Turnstone have launched a video contest that will result in 5 [...]

Beanstalk is a mature product and during its’ 5 years of existence the design and UI have been changed a lot. Our CSS grows accordingly and lately it consisted of 5 files, 14,211 lines and 290 KB of code. We handcrafted our CSS from the start but more recently it had become quite hard to manage. With [...]

Building a high quality product takes time and effort. But as hard as it is to build it, it’s even harder to maintain that quality throughout the years.
We work very hard to maintain the quality of Beanstalk and Postmark with a beautiful web interface and powerful, easy to use features.
Powerful and easy is easier said [...]

Why we didn’t sell Newsberry
When I first sat down to write the story about shutting down Newsberry, it was very therapeutic. I wanted to get it out there, all the real, honest thoughts behind it. What I didn’t expect was the amount of interest in our decision process, the amount of support and also the [...]

While we’re on our company retreat in Malaga, Spain, I wanted to catch up on some important announcements. Our team is continuing to grow and we’ve recently add two more great people to our Philadelphia office.
First, welcome Russ Thompson to the team. Russ will be in charge of web operations for Postmark and Beanstalk, making [...]

Shutting down our first product
You may have heard or read about Wildbit shutting down Newsberry, our first product on January 2nd. Chris wrote about a few reasons behind it, but I felt like we needed to be totally honest about how we got to this decision. This was a tough time for us, personally, as [...]

In my past life I was working in health insurance. Insurance works in a method called pooling. 10 people pay $10 each, and when one has an accident that costs $80, the insurance company can pay the claim, and still make some money. There’s the reverse of course, where health insurance companies collect $100, but [...]