Wildbit

Hi! My name is Hristo Deshev, and I am the new kid on the block here at Wildbit. Well, “kid” is a gross exaggeration with me being almost 30, but I sometimes like to think of myself as just a kid – the only difference from me being 10 is that I have different toys now. :-)

I am a programming language, development tool, and platform junkie with many interests, but at the moment I am serving as a .NET developer for Newsberry. Newsberry is an old project with a huge codebase. And guess what? I have to learn it. I’ve been doing that for some time now, and I daresay I have been making good progress. Here I’d like to share some tips and techniques both on the technological and philosophical level that have proven themselves useful.

In the quality assurrance field, the main goal is to ensure the quality and reliability of the product. Manual testing is the most common way of testing and it consumes a lot of time. However, there are techinques to shorten the time needed for manual testing by automating time-consuming tasks.

The new Newsberry has been online for quite some time, and you might have noticed that some things are different. We mostly applied the new look of the public site to the application, but one thing needed a serious overhaul…

You may have already noticed that we redesigned Newsberry public to give it a fresh, clean new look. It’s Step Two of the effort we talked about earlier to update the application with not only new features, but also a clean-up of what’s there.

It was about time that we finally redesigned the public site of our Email Marketing application, Newsberry. I’m very proud that I had the chance to do this – I kind of lurked on this task since I started working at Wildbit.

A new look for Newsberry’s public site is coming next week, along with some exciting new features. Here is a sneak peek, so be sure to check out the site next week and follow us on Twitter for the announcement.

We have released a great new update related to sub-lists feature for Newsberry, which will allow you to control even more efficiently than before to whom you would like to send the email campaigns. From now on, you would be able to create sub-list of all opened, unopened, bounced emails (even by type of bounce) and sub-list of email addresses of subscribers which clicked a link in the campaigns they received.

We released a great new feature for Newsberry: Highrise integration.

Highrise is an online contact manager and address book, which keeps contact info centralized, sharable, and safe online. By integrating with Newsberry, you can synchronize contacts between Newsberry and Highrise. This is the first integration tool for Newsberry and we plan to release more in the near future.

To say the least, the Wildbit retreat was amazing. It was an all around good time and we discussed strategy, goals, and had plenty of knowledge sharing. We’d like to be as open as possible about our goals and plans. With that in mind, here are some things we are focusing on in the next 6 – 12 months.

We’ve made some great updates to Newsberry recently, including our partnership with SenderScore, new subscriber forms that allow complete customization of fields and forms, and the ability to add users and set permissions for the account and lists.

We arrived in Turkey on Friday night and so far it has been amazing. It’s great to meet with a team of people who you work with each day, but hardly see in person. Some of us have never even met in person, although the first time meeting was as if we’ve always been friends. As Ilya put it, “It’s really great to meet as a team, but even better to now realize we are a group of good friends from around the world.”

We just recently finished up the details and itineraries for our next company retreat. Trying to choose a location, environment, and time for 10 people in 6 countries is not easy! While we also considered Croatia, Malta, Spain, and Greece we decided on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The flights were the least expensive and it is pretty close to everyone. Not to mention getting a Visa is simple.

We recently posted about open designer and developer positions at Wildbit. After a lot of reviews, discussions, and trials we have hire two new employees! Please welcome our latest designer, Gilbert, from Germany and our latest rails developer, Petyo, from Bulgaria.

This week we released a big improvement in Newsberry for customizing subscribe forms and fields in your list. With this new release, you can now fully customize your list and form fields, including:

A lot of companies think of customer service at the high-level or grand scale. Help systems, Call centers, Infrastructure, etc. Running Beanstalk and Newsberry, I do as much as possible at the individual level as possible. It’s where customer service really counts. Deciding to use Campfire chat for support has been one of the best moves for us, despite the mishaps. We offer direct access, and in turn, obtain direct feedback from our customers.