No bullshit software project hosting
We’re having some load issues today, most likely due to intensive export operations. Things may be up and down as we try to keep things running. If one slice goes down then all the load goes to the other slice and then it becomes unresponsive. It’s not been a fun day. I think as soon as we get both slices up in a stable way, we should be good.
If you’re having trouble exporting, don’t keep trying to export. Just email support@devjavu.com and I’ll do it for you this weekend.
-Jeff
Over the next few months, DevjaVu will be winding down and eventually shutting down. We’ll try to hold on as long as possible, but we don’t have the money to run more than a few months unless we work something out with Engine Yard (perhaps go down to one slice). We highly recommend you start migrating off as soon as possible. A more concrete end of service date will be announced soon.
You have access to your SVN repo and Trac instance in the Admin under Export. If your repository is too big to export, we can do the export for you and give you a link to download. Just contact support@devjavu.com if that’s the case. If worse comes to worse and we do have to shut down before everybody is off, we’ll give plenty of warning and then provide downloadable exports of everybody’s projects linked in an email to the project owner once the service is off.
This is the first time I’ve had to do anything like this, so if you have any feedback on handling this in a better way, let me know. I’d love to give a detailed explanation of what’s going on, but I think I’m going to hold off until the final day. In short: the business never got the momentum I wanted to sustain my personal interest, so while running at breakeven worked so-so for so long, it finally started dying and has been losing money for a while. I started an effort to save it, but I decided I did not want to continue supporting this type of service.
Sorry everybody! I would have liked this to be less of a surprise than it is for some of you, which could have been avoided if I better communicated with you guys up to this point. If you have questions or concerns, email me at jeff@devjavu.com
-Jeff
Hey everybody!
I know things have been pretty quiet. Man, it’s tough running a service like this on your own. Don’t worry though, things should start ramping up soon with all the things set in motion behind the scenes.
It’s funny too though because DevjaVu is getting more free signups than ever. It’s funny because free project registration requires an invite code. I know we have a public invite code that anybody can use, but it still means people are going out of their way to search for an invite code.
Unfortunately, we’re dealing with some growing pains and we’re getting a lot of heavy load on our servers from Subversion usage. We’ve got an interesting plan to solve this (which I shouldn’t talk about yet), but for now and because our registration process has been somewhat flaky, we’re going to turn off the invite code for free projects in the next 48 hours. This means you won’t be able to signup for new projects until our big re-release.
Now about that… basically we’re repositioning the DevjaVu service and so it’s going to be renamed and the pricing structure will change a bit. It’s also getting a brand spanking new look both on the site and the default project theme. And if things go as planned, we’ll be releasing with a completely open free project plan.
So yes, after a period of stagnation we have changes abound coming up. But for now, we’re closing free project registration within the next 48 hours. Sorry guys!
-Jeff
Early this morning the Subversion authorization configuration for many of our projects became corrupted, preventing access to those repositories. Unfortunately, I am a major bottleneck in response to DevjaVu service emergencies. This happened to coincide with me moving and not having Internet access, and this morning having my phone die without being able to charge it. I didn’t know there was a problem until very late into the emergency and I wasn’t able to get online to do anything about it until even later.
Obviously this is a terrible excuse for a full day of service interruption. I do the best I can with the resources I have, but I know this is unacceptable. Particularly the lack of communication while handling it. That’s an easy one to fix for next time. I’ll also be looking at hiring a part-time emergency technician and putting together an SLA for premium users.
Not to mention the cause of this outage should not be possible when we migrate to our new system that’s been in development for some time. I want to share more about that soon, but for now I’d just like to appologize for this outage and the lack of communication regarding it.
-Jeff
As an introductory topic for our users forum, I’d like to pose the question: What is DevjaVu and Trac about?
It’s not exactly “project management” even if it does involve it. You might say “developer tools” but tell that to a developer and they’ll think compilers and editors. Sure it’s “issue tracking and version control” but that’s not all it is. Plenty of people have those things but don’t have what DevjaVu is.
So join us in a discussion about how to describe DevjaVu. As our users, you guys should know best!
-Jeff
We just launched a simple Helpdesk project that we’re going to be using in place of Mojo Helpdesk. Hopefully its wiki will grow into a useful user resource and support knowledgebase. We don’t have much on it now, but we’ll be adding some of the commonly discussed issues up there. Eventually we’ll get some sort of feature wish list poll on there too. Feel free to make changes to the wiki using your DevjaVu user account. All users have permission to work with the wiki and tickets.
We also launched a forum replacement using Google Groups. Since we don’t need a forum as featurefull as PunBB and the Troubleshooting section was being used for support issues when we have better channels, we’ve set up a simple discussion forum for users that wish to participate in community chatter. The old PunBB forum will be around for a while at forums.devjavu.com, but all links have been changed to point to forum.devjavu.com, which will take you the DevjaVu Users group.
By the way, we really like Google Groups and highly recommend it for your mailing list and forum needs. If you need several “forums” you can always create separate groups.
-Jeff
I was just re-reading The Development Abstraction Layer by Joel Spolsky and, even though it’s exaggerated for effect, this long-winded example does a great job of showing how big of a difference using DevjaVu can make for your startup:
Programmers need a Subversion repository. Getting a Subversion repository means you need a network, and a server, which has to be bought, installed, backed up, and provisioned with uninterruptible power, and that server generates a lot of heat, which means it need to be in a room with an extra air conditioner, and that air conditioner needs access to the outside of the building, which means installing an 80 pound fan unit on the wall outside the building, which makes the building owners nervous, so they need to bring their engineer around, to negotiate where the air conditioner unit will go (decision: on the outside wall, up here on the 18th floor, at the most inconvenient place possible), and the building gets their lawyers involved, because we’re going to have to sign away our firstborn to be allowed to do this, and then the air conditioning installer guys show up with rigging gear that wouldn’t be out of place in a Barbie play-set, which makes our construction foreman nervous, and he doesn’t allow them to climb out of the 18th floor window in a Mattel harness made out of 1/2″ pink plastic, I swear to God it could be Disco Barbie’s belt, and somebody has to call the building agent again and see why the hell they suddenly realized, 12 weeks into a construction project, that another contract amendment is going to be needed for this goddamned air conditioner that they knew about before Christmas and they only just figured it out, and if your programmers even spend one minute thinking about this that’s one minute too many.
To the software developers on your team, this all needs to be abstracted away as typing svn commit on the command line.
With DevjaVu you can skip all of that and jump straight to svn commit. Not to mention everything else you get.
-Jeff
That’s better. Not perfect, but nothing will look as good in IE. At least I got to brush up on the timeless art of cross-browser styling.
Actually I think I cheated because I just used conditional styles for IE and IE7. Anyway, this has been a nice reminder that we still have to think about IE (in fact, in two flavors now). I’m really happy to get back to non-browser issues now.
Hope you guys are enjoying the free accounts and spreading the word. They won’t last long!
-Jeff
Today I was playing with Parallels for the first time and I tried out our site using the Windows Internet Exporer and… wow… We’ve checked on Windows Firefox, but for whatever reason, we just never bother to check on IE. The explanation is probably obvious, but I think that’s still no excuse when 15% of our visitors are IE users. I’m surprised we haven’t gotten hate mail.
Actually, it’s not that bad, but definitely bad enough to scare away anybody that might have been interested in using us, I’m sure. Click for full size:
Yeah, I don’t know what to say. I guess we have a bit of browser compatibility work in front of us.
-Jeff
The other night we deployed a new site. Actually, it’s the same site, it just looks different. It also has a slightly better signup process, something we’re still working on. Ideally it would be as simple and convenient as possible, since it’s the same process you’d go through to set up a free project…
Which reminds me, we’re going to open up free projects for a while. We’re going to do this by providing a master invite code for a limited time. You can use it to start free projects right now!
Just use johnny5 as the invite code when you select the Free plan. You’ll get an email confirmation and link to your new project almost immediately. You better get started now, this is a limited time offer available until the end of the year!
-Jeff
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