Apologies for intermittent proof page issues

We want to apologise for any performance issues that you may have experienced on the proof pages late Thursday and Friday.  Having moved and upgraded our entire hosting infrastructure a week ago we are incredibly disappointed that this happened.

The problem was human error on our part caused by incorrectly adding a session management function that was supposed to enable a user session to be split across multiple web servers.  The session manager caused the proof page function to slow down intermittently.  We have tracked down the issue and as at 22:00 GMT on Friday it was resolved.

Apologies again for any problems that you experienced.

Anthony Welgemoed joins ProofHQ as CTO

I would like to announce a big change at ProofHQ.

Anthony Welgemoed has joined us as CTO.   Anthony is a super-sharp technologist with terrific experience with both marketing workflow and SaaS software products.  He joins us from Mtivity (the last company I founded) and before that he ran a 25 person development team at Lastminute.com.

It’s perfect timing having someone of Anthony’s calibre step into the CTO role:

• Our development team is growing quickly.  We have 10 people split between Poland, the UK and shortly the USA.  This requires more sophisticated product road map planning and better management of day-to-day product development.
• Our core client base is growing massively.  This puts pressure on us to scale our infrastructure and keep it scaleable.
• We are doing more “consulting and integration” work for Fortune 100 clients.  That work needs to be completed in parallel with our core product development.  This is a discipline that most SaaS companies need to manage.
• Our architecture is split between quite different technologies (Flex, PHP/MySQL, Java, Windows).  That complexity needs to be managed efficiently so that the pace of product development is maintained.
• Finally, we have more partner relationships to support at a technical level.

This is a great step forward for ProofHQ.  we are delighted to have Anthony join us.

Team Meetup in Wroclaw, Poland

We had one of our regular team meetups last week.

The ProofHQ team is split between the UK, Poland, Qatar, Ireland and (shortly) the US.  In fact, the team in Poland are split between five cities, so they see each other as little as they do the rest of us.  We all work remotely and connect every day by Skype, GoToMeeting and email.

View ProofHQ Team in a larger map

Remote working has huge advantages, but also some disadvantages.  We all miss those quick end-of-day beers and the opportunity to chill out together face-to-face .  To compensate we try and get together regularly in one place.  The folks from Poland have been to London a few times and we have travelled to Poland, including for social events such as weddings.  We are now trying to make these meetups a quarterly event and make them part of the ProofHQ “rythm” (daily scrums, fortnighly sprints, monthly releases, quarterly meetups, etc).

Last week we returned to Wroclaw, which is a historical city in south west Poland.  Wroclaw was where we hired our first team member in Poland (Irek) and is one of the top technology hubs in the country.  The rest of the team travelled in from Gdansk, Lodz, Lublin, the UK and Quatar.

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January Service Level report

Below is the monthly uptime report of January 2010

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Name:           ProofHQ Production
Service:        HTTP
Host (port):    www.proofhq.com (80)
Check period:   3 minutes

# of checks:  14,340

# of outages: 1

# of failed : 1

Uptime:         99.993 %

Avg. response time: 0.229 s