Wildbit

The last couple days were pretty rough for Beanstalk and our customers. We experience very high load across all of our slices, eventually determining that the performance problem was on our GFS drives that store our application and SVN data. Since we host with Engine Yard, we have nice Nagios warnings about high load, which started to come in on Tuesday. After lots of digging and help from the Engine Yard support team, we were able to narrow down the problems.

Beanstalk has been booming ever since we launched it. We’ve learned a lot in the last 18 months about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to promotion and advertising. I’d like to share some our experiences.

Today we upgraded storage levels on all Beanstalk plans, including 100mb on the Free Plan. The increase in storage includes:

Free: From 20Mb to 100Mb
Personal: From 1GB to 3GB
Team: From 3GB to 6GB
Business: From 8GB to 12GB
Corporate: From 15GB to 24GB

We’re looking to hire a Rails developer to help grow and support Beanstalk, our hosted Subversion app. A minimum of 2 years experience in building Rails apps is required.

This weekend we launched two important updates to Beanstalk: Upgraded to Subversion 1.5.5 and released major performance improvements to the web interface. Learn about the upgrades, how it effects your account, and some known issues.

You need code changes deployed to the development and production servers faster? You’re using releases? Sometimes you need it faster? Then read on…

We released a great new feature for Beanstalk called Web Hooks which allows you to customize, extend and integrate the web applications you use with Beanstalk. By using web hooks in your Beanstalk repository, you can get information about each commit to your Beanstalk repository.

After integrating Beanstalk with Harvest, we released one more integration for Beanstalk: Freckle. Freckle is a thoughtful and beautiful web-based time tracking application built for small business.

We’re reaching out to all Beanstalk customers to learn more about how you use the system and how it has helped your workflow. Are you working on an interesting app or product? We’d like to know. Over the next few months we’ll be featuring applications, products, and sites that are hosted in Beanstalk.

Gilbert (our kick-ass designer from Germany) just jumped in IM to tell me that Beanstalk was featured in .net magazine (issue 184). The article is about Subversion in general and there is a great full page description about Beanstalk taking the hassle out of managing a server. When you work so hard on a product, a feature like this is hugely rewarding.

Hi there. My name is Ilya Sabanin and I’m the lead Beanstalk developer. This is my first blog post here, even though I have worked at Wildbit since April (and really enjoying it). I plan to post some more stuff about our development process, improvements and new features in Beanstalk, and other interesting stuff.

Today I want to introduce the refined repository export in Beanstalk.

Communication is the mantra of two of my long-time feeds. Proper communication of your actions adds tremendous value to your work. Without good communication skills you’re nothing but a lone ‘hacker’ doing stuff for yourself. And what can be better than talking with the team without leaving your favorite text editor/IDE?

Recently Ilya asked me about good looking wallpapers for desktop. I decided that it would be nice to have a “big screen” companion to our iPhone wallpapers and designed this set for real fans.

We just had a short outage on Beanstalk, which required a quick reboot on our slices at Engine Yard. While this situation really sucks, it happens. The best thing you can do is let people know you’re working on it and update them on the progress. By using Campfire, we’re able to give people an extra sense of comfort that real people are hard at work on the problem. In the end, a negative thing becomes a positive experience.

While we work on improving the performance and speed of our deployment tools, we also wanted to push a small, but important update to the releases interface. The previous interface was kind of clunky and, in our opinion, “was trying too hard” to be ajaxy and cool. Well, we got rid of that crap and kept things simple. The new interface using the same work flow that we use for our integration tools, which creates a consistent interface in our app, reduces code we need to write, and gets rid of any javascript and ajax requests that make things more complicated than they should be. Here are some before and after screen shots.