News
What we have been up to for the last year
FridayBuilds Team
August 01, 2025
Around this time last year I was talking with a few people to do some security auditing on our backbone systems, thinking we are ready to go live by September. One year later, I am almost exactly in the same situation 😅. A few things are different this time though.
First of all we moved to Kubernetes. Yeah I know, try to contain (get it?) your excitement. I thought Kubernetes would be too difficult to learn and we would need to change so much stuff in our code to integrate with it. However in reality, that was exactly the case. But ANYWAY, now we have Kubernetes, an autoscaling cluster, distributed storage volumes and so so many more features we can build on. I can now clearly see that if we went live last year, the existing setup just wouldn't work.
The next big thing is that we are now going through a usability-testing phase and oh boy is that a learning experience! It's actually very very interesting to sit beside someone and SEE how they use the app without intervening. Some things become apparent right away (like oh yeah 3 people spam-clicked this thing which we didn't make clickable, maybe we should?) and some other are just things that you just don't expect (we have 3 different places that show a spinner when there is a deployment in progress but no-one clicked on it to see progress or errors). Anyway useful stuff! Do your usability testing, it's so worth it!
These are the two main big things that are different at surface of what's going on right now. Behind the scenes FridayBuilds has many more new features, like:
First of all we moved to Kubernetes. Yeah I know, try to contain (get it?) your excitement. I thought Kubernetes would be too difficult to learn and we would need to change so much stuff in our code to integrate with it. However in reality, that was exactly the case. But ANYWAY, now we have Kubernetes, an autoscaling cluster, distributed storage volumes and so so many more features we can build on. I can now clearly see that if we went live last year, the existing setup just wouldn't work.
The next big thing is that we are now going through a usability-testing phase and oh boy is that a learning experience! It's actually very very interesting to sit beside someone and SEE how they use the app without intervening. Some things become apparent right away (like oh yeah 3 people spam-clicked this thing which we didn't make clickable, maybe we should?) and some other are just things that you just don't expect (we have 3 different places that show a spinner when there is a deployment in progress but no-one clicked on it to see progress or errors). Anyway useful stuff! Do your usability testing, it's so worth it!
These are the two main big things that are different at surface of what's going on right now. Behind the scenes FridayBuilds has many more new features, like:
- detailed scaling tool for processes and services
- monitoring for cpu, memory, storage and traffic usage
- brand new home, pricing and documentation pages
- an entire billing section, with invoices, credits, card management, incurred charges, costs projection and more
All that is happening on our testing environment, the changes are so many that we can't just slowly migrate to the new functionality. Here are some teasers though:
I am very excited for the last few months of 2025. It looks like this is the year we will finally leave beta. If you want to join the adventure, we also have a discord server. Come meet us there, share your thoughts or your dev nightmares: https://discord.gg/DKZ6D8hX8C