Wildbit

We’re looking to hire a Rails developer to help grow and support our apps: Beanstalk and Postmark (with a primary focus on Postmark). A minimum of 2 years experience in building Rails apps is required. Email jobs@wildbit.com or continue reading.

It’s not often that you see a presentation or a code repository that blows you away. That’s why this past month was a stand-out. I found two incredibly useful projects floating in the Java/Scala community, that compelled me to write idiomatic ports for C#.
Bantam
Robert Nystrom wrote an interesting article about the benefits of Pratt parsing [...]

We just returned from our retreat in Barcelona, Spain. It was by far one of the most fun and productive retreats we’ve ever had. As with every Wildbit retreat, you can expect a ton of renewed energy and releases from us really soon. I want to sum up some of the progress and goals.

We spent [...]

Today, we’re extremely proud to announce our Total Web Services Solution (TWSS for short). Since we started building products back in 2006, we’ve learned a lot about the things that you need – and don’t need – in order to run a successful webapp company. We’ve kept up with the curve of running systems in [...]

I feel like we just got back from Greece, Wildbit’s last retreat in August. At the same time, so many amazing things have happened since then. Beanstalk and Postmark are growing like crazy, Alex Hillman and Daniel Crenna joined the team, and overall our team has been kicking ass on our products. 2010 was a [...]

Odds are you know the name already, and if you do, you realize that 2011 is a big year for Wildbit. What? You don’t know Alex Hillman? Let’s fix that. Alex is the dangerously awesome guy who (along with some others) proved that coworking is not only valuable to our careers and community, but sustainable. [...]

Postmark has been growing fast. As a start up, we are pretty conservative when it comes to hiring new resources until we really understand the need. We launched Postmark back in April and ever since Hristo and the team have been very busy. To give Hristo some relief and to speed up progress, we hired Milan Gornik. Being a virtual team we usually hire based on recommendation. Milan came highly recommended from Igor, our awesome QA guy at Wildbit who lives in Serbia.

We use the awesome Dynect service to shard our accounts between several SVN clusters and for other nice stuff as well. Recently they deprecated their SOAP API that we’ve been using for a while, so they asked us to switch to their new version of the SOAP or REST API. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any Ruby library that would provide everything we needed for our integration, so I set to write our own. Meet Dynectastic! The library allows you to manage zones, nodes and records. What’s cool about Dynectastic is that it supports Jobs. When some request is taking too much time to complete, Dynect creates a Job object for it and returns it’s identifier. It works nicely with Dynectastic. Another cool feature is automatic retry of your request when Dynect is busy. The gem was released last monday, but I decided to wait a bit before announcing it to catch possible bugs.

Beanstalk is now using Dynectastic daily to create/delete dozens of records and nodes. You can find all the information you need in the README file. As always, don’t hesitate to send patches and pull requests if you know how to improve Dynectastic. Happy coding!

We at Wildbit are kind of hooked on Olark, a simple live chat service. Ever wanted to add customer chat to your sites or applications, but even thinking about using another third party app on your end made you forget about it? Well, Olark to the rescue, a small JavaScript snippet and an IM-Client with Gtalk or Jabber support is all you need. Assuming that everyone pretty much uses the latter already, implementation should be a cakewalk for everyone.

One of the most difficult things for us to manage as a team has always been schedules. As in working schedules for each person on the team. We always work more than we should, and nobody has specific hours. On our recent retreat, we decided that we finally needed to set some concrete schedules for a few reasons.

We’re a small team at Wildbit. This means that all of us usually contribute in support. A lot of times I will get responses like “Oh wow, you’re the founder and doing support!”. The same happens when our lead developers or designers are answering requests as well. To me though, this is natural and important. The best way to enhance a product is by understanding what your customers want and need, as well as where they have trouble. Since we all participate in communication, we want people to know more about who we are and what we do. If they talk to Gilbert in chat, we want the customer to know that he has direct responsibility for the design. To make Wildbit a bit more personal, we decided on a few things that could help.

Last week, the entire Wildbit team was in Aegina, Greece for our 2010 retreat. Hopefully you didn’t notice, because we tried hard to keep up with support. If you don’t know, Wildbit is a completely virtual team across six countries. Each year we meet up to discuss goals, improve and just hang out like a regular team. This was Wildbit’s 4th retreat, the last ones being in Bulgaria, Turkey and Cyprus. We usually rent a big villa in a nice location. 2010 has been a great year for Wildbit, so we tried to splurge a bit.

Creating a ticket in the task management system is easy. But frequently, you probably run into the situation where your tickets get “noisy” and become unreadable.
Why does this happen? Well, when many people are involved in a specific ticket, there will be bunch of assigning, back and forth communication, until the ticket is approved, [...]

Ever since we started working on Postmark we decided we would have a cool REST API that uses simple JSON as transport. Being mostly web developers ourselves, we wanted to help people break away from the SMTP tyranny. As most people around, we hated SMTP — it’s an ancient protocol and its age shows… [...]

Last week we launched our new bounces UI for Postmark. We significantly cleaned up the delivery issues page trying to both give you a better tool for visualizing bounces and spam complaints and introduce our new features: tags, bounce dumps, inactive bounces. We are proud with the user interface, but having a UI is not always the best thing you can do. What if you had in mind a different way to visualize delivery issues? What if you want to tightly integrate your application with Postmark and fetch and display bounces directly in your dashboard instead of requiring users to use the Postmark UI? Now you can do that!