&yet

For those that don’t know, Ship Week (Ship It Monday, Brio and Úll) are happening right now in Dublin.

For Ship It! Monday we announced that And Bang 2.0 is now Beta, which you can now sign up to join the queue.

And Bang is our team same-page-ification app that helps you and your team celebrate progress together throughout the day and ship like the wind.

To join in the celebrations from home, we decided that it would be appropriate to launch a little something of our own. That something being a rocket, because what the heck, why not?

Buried in email. Overwhelmed by your backlog. Ugh.

We built And Bang cos we're tired of tools that make us feel bad about doing work we love. (Aren't you?)

And Bang is here to help you and your team:

Starting this Friday, our awesome And Bang 1.0 customers will be receiving invitations to the And Bang 2.0 private beta.

We built And Bang because we're tired of tools that make us feel bad about doing work we love. (Aren't you?)

We believe you should do the work you love in a way you love.

Today, we're open sourcing signalmaster.

Paired with SimpleWebRTC.js, this is all you need to set up and serve WebRTC video calls.

Happy WebRTCing!

We're announcing two WebRTC projects today: SimpleWebRTC.js and conversat.io.

WebRTC is one of the most exciting additions to HTML5, enabling direct peer-to-peer connections for video and audio streaming. We’ve been playing with WebRTC for almost a year now, including helping clients like AT&T put it into play.

One conclusion we've come to is that WebRTC should be easier for developers to work with if it's going to gain more adoption. More people should be playing with this new amazing technology, but there's a lot of annoying complexity when working with it. As Mikeal Rogers put it, "It’s about 10x more complicated than WebSockets, and it’s taken 3 years to be where we are with WebSockets."

SimpleWebRTC.js

One of the main focuses of AT&T's Developer Summit at CES in Las Vegas this year was WebRTC.

The AT&T WebRTC API truly untethers user phone numbers from their mobile device. When your phone number on your mobile rings, so can your browser and your tablet. It's the kind of thing that could make answering your phone or making a phone call from anywhere as easy as checking your email is today.

&yet was privileged to play a central role in AT&T's work with WebRTC this year, alongside other partners like Ericsson and Voxeo Labs.

&yet has teamed up with the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto to deliver several projects this past year. Some were shared at CES and most of those are featured at js.att.io and on AT&T's GitHub account. (Note that at this time, you have to be a registered AT&T Alpha Developer in order to use the API.)

So if you’re anything like me and you are very excited about something, you want to celebrate it.

If you are me, two of those things are Christmas and &yet.

This being my first Christmas with &yet, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I mean, I assumed it would be nothing short of awesomeness, I just couldn’t picture it in my head.

Sometime in the spring of this year, the &yet team caravanned down to the lovely southeastern Washington outpost of Walla Walla for a day of team reflection, hanging out, and planning. It was a beautiful day and we took advantage by wandering around the Whitman College campus and talking about what we like about the team and ways to improve the team.

It's now months later, and I was to have followed up long ago with a summary of actions we can take to be more awesome. I kept putting it off (not awesome) and recently got called out (awesome). Get with it Zanol.

Deploying a production application can be quite the chore. On the road to &! 2.0, our processes have changed significantly. In the beginning stages of &! 1.0, I hate to say it, but deploys were a completely manual process. We logged in to the server over SSH, pulled from Git, and restarted processes all by hand. Less than ideal, to say the least.

Managing those processes was just as bad; we were using forever and a simple SysVInit script (those things in /etc/init.d for you non-ops types) to run it. When the process would crash, forever would restart it and we'd be happy. Everything seemed great, but then one day we accidentally pushed broken code live. What did forever do? Kept trying to help us, by restarting the process. The process that crashes instantly. Several CPU usage warning emails from our hosting provider later, we realized what had happened and fixed the broken code. That's when we realized that blindly restarting the app when it crashes wasn't a great idea.

Since our servers all run Ubuntu, we already had Upstart in place so swapping out the old not-so-great init.d scripts for the new, much nicer, Upstart scripts was pretty simple and life was good again. With these we had a simple way to run the app under a different user (running as root is bad, please don't do it), load environment variables, and even respawn crashed processes (with limits! no more CPU usage warnings!).

“Your onboarding sucks, guys.”

In between bites of breakfast, our friend, Pradeep Elankumaran (Kicksend CEO), was giving us feedback on using And Bang 1.0 right after the initial release.

We got a lot of input in the early beta days of And Bang and had already made some iterations based on that feedback. But Pradeep was one of the few folks we’d sent an invite to without having some discussion about the app as they were using it for the first time.