New Year, new FridayBuilds! Well... Never too late for fireworks! 🥲

The last few months (or maybe years) have been a very maturing journey! FridayBuilds is finally running natively on Kubernetes, offers real High Availability and proudly stands on stable, secure and scalable ground (or cloud?)!

The most notable new features we worked on since the previous live version:

But really in a modern platform these are all just the basics.

The heavy work has been put into the backbone of FridayBuilds systems. Into setting up a reliable cluster, learning the tools and ecosystem of Kubernetes, implementing hardening and security features. Things that are mostly transparent to end users, but so so critical to be able to run a deployment platform with the reliability that we want to be represented by.

It took three years to come this far, feeling very excited for the next ones!

Having access to your application directory can be crucial when you are doing things wrong want to check your production environment in detail. Maybe you need direct access to the database or want to check if a file is really there. Who knows? Maybe you have your reasons to rm -rf that repo or hijack that live app*.

Whatever the case, you can now launch an interactive terminal that gives you access directly inside your app's container. To do so, just navigate to your app's settings page and find the relevant button under the Remote Commands section. The amount of headache and frustrating chat-gpt sessions we had to go through to bring this feature to life was probably more frustrating than a parent vacuuming on a Sunday morning, when you had no school. The work behind it is pretty interesting though (for the tech-savvy people at least), and will probably make a very strong blog post, to which we will leave a link 👉 here 👈 (in the future).

Without further ado, go experience the terminal, go experience the future!

Other updates:

As we are riding the waves towards leaving Beta, we are focusing on the most critical features first, like learning how to swim (👀 patiently 👇 at /changelog). Secondary tasks like implementing payments and billing can definitely wait. Who cares about scaling to multiple servers or load balancing? Just look at that thing swim and be happy!

But seriously, when I am working on given designs, I always ship results very close to the original Figma design. Like *at least* 14.3% accuracy. So today, 5 minutes after I deployed the new changelog pages, news have traveled far and wide to reach our designer's ears. Need I say more? I spent 2 more hours fixing paddings, line-heights, extending the tailwind config, realigning everything, etc., but mostly watching our logo swim across the screen.

Even though it can be frustrating, it has been a humbling and learning experience every time. These minor (in my eyes) changes I am so reluctant to dig back into and fix, always end up adding up to a very significant difference (for the better) when I compare before and after screenshots.
TL;DR: Trust your designers.

This week we took some time to revisit the navigation structure, the organization of cards and where everything is supposed to be. It was that familiar time when dev-ing stands in the corner and takes a beating from the ux-ing. Ux-ing won, but dev-ing came out stronger than before. It was worth it, so let's take a quick look at each bruise the punches left us with:

Of course we saved the most important new feature for last. Make sure you are sitting in a sturdy chair cause this one might be the one that knocks you out (!):

With the new dashboard everything is more organized. You now have a page where you can quickly see your most recent actions per app/day. This is also your go-to place to stay updated (and excited, which of course you already are... right?) with what happens in our ecosystem, view our roadmap or just check the latest changelog (like this one!).

You also now have an overview of all your services in a single page. We improved link/unlink functionality so you can move services between different apps.

Last but not least, navigation got a mini boost. We moved everything into a single navigation area that spans horizontally across your screen. Going into an app page, changes the navigation context to be app-centered (hooray for breadcrumbs), but you can easily go back to your dashboard or apps panel.

Hope you find the update useful. Welcome to the new dashboard. Welcome home *spotlights dramatically fade out*

TL;DR