It’s been a crazy busy year so far. While we’ve updated our Postmark and Beanstalk blogs quite a bit with new features, our Wildbit blog has been a ghost town. Our team has grown a lot and we’re hiring even more, so the reason for our silence is that we’ve been more productive than ever. In the coming months I hope to get some of us back to writing here.
In the meantime, I’d like to introduce you to new members of the Wildbit family.
Michael and Jim, Systems Team
Before we hired anyone for systems, I did a lot of the work myself. It’s fun and I enjoy it, but there are people who are much more talented than I am. That’s why I am extremely happy to introduce both Jim Park and Michael Carruthers to the systems team. Jim came on board in April and Michael just started in July. Since coming on board we’ve come up with some pretty big plans. When we made the move from Rackspace to Server Central, we invested heavily in the best hardware we could buy. Performance across our products improved drastically. As we’ve continued to scale, however, it’s become more difficult to manage. Jim and Michael are working on a much more elaborate provisioning, testing and deployment process for our environments, allowing us to scale faster and automate just about everything. Keep an eye out here for posts about our infrastructure changes as we go.
About Jim and Michael: Jim lives in San Antonio, Texas (and has never worked for Rackspace). Michael lived for several years in Scotland, but recently moved back to his native Victoria, British Columbia. They are both huge fans of SmartOS and ZFS. You can follow Jim at @jim80net or his site. Find Michael at @mdcarruthers.
Michael Baranov, QA Team
QA has been a part of our process since we hired Igor. I can’t imagine shipping code without him at this point. As our team and products grew, and we were shipping more often, Igor’s work load also grew. He managed to combat this with an impressive number of automated tests. Late last year we decided it was time bring on another QA person, creating our first QA team. After going through many resumes and interviews we found Michael Baranov. What we liked most was his attention on manual testing and ability to focus on what is important. QA testing is not about a mundane test plan, it’s about breaking shit that no one thought could be broken. People like Michael and Igor have a knack for finding ways to do just that. They've been working together for several months now and Michael will start to get into automated testing soon. We hope to have some articles posted on these topics soon.
About Michael: He works remotely from Ukraine. He is a nephew of Eugene’s (our designer) wife, which we found out after we hired him.
Derek Rushforth, Design Team
Derek just joined the team in May. Hiring a designer at Wildbit is challenging to say the least. We not only require beautiful aesthetics, but also the ability to code them in HTML, CSS and JS. Derek is one of those rare people, like Eugene, who does all of that very well. With Derek on board, we decided to do something a little different with the design team. Usually QA, Systems, Design and Support are shared across all of our products. With design that can be hard since there is so much domain knowledge and focus involved. We decided to experiment with dedicating Eugene to Beanstalk and dploy.io and Derek to Postmark. So far it’s working amazingly well and the focus has been huge. We’re still figuring out ways to create some overlap, as we go, so they can support each other if demand increases on one product or another. Check out his most recent work on dmarc.postmarkapp.com.
About Derek: Derek is working remotely from Queen Creek, AZ. He was previously in the Marines for 6 years and is now the father of a beautiful daughter. Follow Derek on Dribbble or @diraq.
Matt Freeman, Support Team
Just this week, Matt Freeman joined Dana to create our first support team. Matt has a strong background in technical support after working at companies like Automatic (Wordpress) and Saucelabs. We are just getting him up to speed on our products and you will surely hear from him if you get in touch. With two people dedicated to support, you can also expect improvements in our documentation, guides and developer docs. The goal is to build out our customer development team to serve our customers even better. That means better support, more help getting started with our products and of course, more stickers and t-shirts!
About Matt: Matt is working remotely from Copperas Cove, TX, where he drinks coffee and listens to jazz. Follow him at @n2linux.
You can probably see a trend here. After many years running successful products, we are finally building out teams across the company. We’ve always had teams of developers or designers, but as we grow it’s important to also grow the teams who help support, grow and maintain our products.
Later this month we go on our next retreat to Dominican Republic. I can't wait to get everyone together in the same place.
Say hi to the new additions to our family. It’s a big list!