Our Fearless Leader and CEO Mike McDerment appeared recently on the Business News Network to talk about Cloud Computing and its implications. Click the link to watch it, and be sure to check out the second segment as well (we’ve noticed some loading issues with part II – you may have to wait a little for it to run properly).
At 8:30 AM EST this morning we had an issue in our Dallas Data centre and switched to our secondary Data centre in Virginia. We are now back operating in Dallas, however the activities you performed in your account during the time at Virginia (9:15-9:47 AM EST) currently still reside EXCLUSIVELY in the Virginia data centre/servers.
To get things back to normal we’d suggest that you simply re-perform the FreshBooks activities/tasks that you took between 9:15-9:47 AM – be it sending invoices, logging time, etc.
If you need any assistance all those records and activities are still available on the Virginia server and we can help you replicate those efforts – please contact us.
So you know, we have not isolated the root cause of the outage as of yet. Our development teams are tracking down suspected causes and our operations team is monitoring the server closely. First thing first was to restore service (which we have done) and we will update this post with more details as we have them.
We will be updating this post throughout the day with additional information about this outage. You can also follow our status tweets for immediate notification.
We would like to apologize to anyone that was affected by this outage, and we would like to make it up to you. Please get in touch with us at 1-866-303-6061 or email us at support@freshbooks.com.
Update: this maintenance has been completed.
Your FreshBooks account will be unavailable for a brief period (approximately 10 minutes) at 9:00 am Eastern on Wednesday morning (January 27th, 2010) while we update the FreshBooks service (hey… that’s good news!).
We will be posting updates to our Twitter account as well as at status.freshbooks.com throughout the scheduled period. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and thank you for your understanding.
Fresh Mike Workshop Video from FreshBooks on Vimeo.
Last year, we introduced our How to Build a Web App Business workshops and asked you to help us decide where to take them. Thanks to over 800 of your votes, we’ve shown our faces in the likes of Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Vancouver. This year, we’re still taking your votes and sending our founder and CEO on the road to share the A to Zs of building a web app he learned through his own experience building FreshBooks. So please, if you haven’t had your say, vote for your city to bring a workshop to your town!
Mike will address many of the questions you have as entrepreneurs through topics such as:
Building – your web app, your company, your team
Marketing – with and without dollars
Product management – so you know what’s right to build
Metrics – to track your progress
Financing – the who, what, when, where, why and how 5Ws of fund raising
First stops this year are Miami on Wednesday, February 24 and San Francisco on Friday, February 26.
Details for Miami workshop:
What: How to Build a Web App Business workshop lead by FreshBooks’ CEO Mike McDerment at Future of Web Apps in Miami
Where: Adrienne Arsht Centre (1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL)
When: Wednesday, February 24, 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
How much: Various conference passes available here
Register here!
Thanks to the folks at Carsonified for inviting us to be part of FOWA Miami again this year!
Details for San Francisco workshop:
What: How to Build a Web App Business workshop lead by FreshBooks’ CEO Mike McDerment
Where: BlinkTag HQ HQ (1461 15th St. San Francisco, CA)
When: Friday, February 26, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
How much: $100 per person
Register here!
Big thanks to Brendan and the folks at BlinkTag for so graciously letting us use their space for the day!
Leave a comment or drop me a note at rayanne [at] freshbooks.com if you have any questions you want Mike to address.
It’s not too late if you want us to take the workshop to your town. vote here! Tell us where we should go next!
Where in the world are people accessing FreshBooks?
One Friday per month we have developer Hack Offs at FreshBooks. Hack Offs are one day code sprints, where our developers are given the entire day to work on whatever they want. They’re a lot of fun and it’s amazing how often ideas that start as Hack Offs make their way into the product.
Last Hack Off I thought it would be interesting to see from where in the world people were using FreshBooks right now. I figured mapping where anonymous FreshBooks events were happening in real-time would be a doable visualization project. The result of my hack off was FreshMap, and folks seemed to like it. So much in fact, that we’ve put it up on a 52″ TV in the office kitchen!
We’ve also put a version up on our website, so you can view it here. (Go on, it’s fairly mesmerizing).
How does it actually work?
Technically speaking, FreshMap is pretty simple. It uses the Google Maps API for the map and geocoding, and JQuery to fetch data from the web service, which returns anonymous recent events from FreshBooks that are formatted as JSON (we made this anonymous data feed to power our home page).
If any developers want to check out the source code, you can find FreshMap on GitHub.
Again – check out FreshMap live!
We’re pleased to announce that you can now bill customers and collect payment using multiple currencies inside FreshBooks. At first glance, the changes are small and subtle, but they have far-reaching effects throughout your account. Let me take you over most of them:
Now, when you create a new invoice (or estimate, or recurring invoice), you’ll be prompted to choose a currency for that invoice. Doesn’t get much simpler than this. The appropriate currency symbol and number formatting will appear dynamically, and carry over to your template.
Most of your FreshBooks account will continue to work in your base currency. For example, if you’re a USD company, your re-usable items and project rates will continue to be stored in USD. When you put these on a foreign currency invoice, however, a helpful exchange rate widget will let you dynamically mark up (or down) your invoice according to the latest exchange rate data.
Starting now, reports will group values and totals according to the currency in which they take place. There’s a few exceptions, most notably the Profit and Loss report, which will report figures solely in your base currency by averaging exchange rate data over the queried period.
Even if you don’t plan to make use of our new multi-currency features, there’s still good news: we’ve jazzed up our account statement to look more like our sharp new invoice template. And for the first time, printed account statements will fit in double-windowed envelopes, perfect for snail mailing to your clients.
This is one of the largest releases we’ve ever had the privilege of delivering, and we’re sure you’ve got questions. So, we’ve put together a new multi-currency FAQ to help explain how it all fits together. Of course you’re always welcome to e-mail us or post a message on our forums with inquiries.
So, that about does it. We hope you’ll find this latest set of features both useful and enjoyable. And as always, feedback is both encouraged and greatly appreciated!
Update: This maintenance has been completed.
Your FreshBooks account will be unavailable for a brief period (approximately 10 minutes) at 9:30am Eastern on Wednesday morning (January 13th, 2010) while we update the FreshBooks service (hey… that’s good news!).
We will be posting updates to our Twitter account as well as at status.freshbooks.com throughout the scheduled period. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and thank you for your understanding.
Mike was on TV Wednesday talking about three tools small businesses can use to manage their cashflow (FreshBooks, PayPal and Shoeboxed). Click the link to watch it (please note that there’s an ad at the start).
Every second Wednesday here at FreshBooks is Release Day, the day we release our latest efforts into production for our beloved FreshBooks users. We like to make frequent releases so that our users feel the momentum of the changes we make. But there’s another important reason for a regular release schedule: process improvement — the pressure to keep deploying compels us to improve our deploy process.
Thanks in part to a “virtuous circle” (note: opposite of a “vicious circle”) we’ve developed, new releases at FreshBooks are usually uneventful. Behind the scenes we work hard to ensure the lessons learned from the last release are passed along to future deploys. The key to this circle is a pair of meetings that work together to keep us organized, I want to take the rest of this post to tell you more these meetings and how they impact our process.
Every second Monday – two days before each release – we hold a Release Planning meeting. This meeting never takes more than half an hour (and is usually quite a bit less). Basically, it’s just a run through of an existing checklist. But checklists are whoa, man, boring. I remember working at a place where EVERY PROBLEM was handled by adding a new line item to THE CHECKLIST. As you can imagine, that checklist got awfully long (it was three pages!). If all you’re doing is running through items in a checklist, you’re going to sleepwalk through the meeting.
So we broke the planning meeting into three parts:
Done Yet?: There are a number of things that ought to be done prior to the Release Planning meeting — making sure the Support team has a liaison to manage communications during the release, writing up a set of deployment instructions for the IT group, and so on. We breeze through these at the meeting because the work is usually done. It’s really just status check in.
Key Assignments: We assign people to the process. Which developer will be responsible for cutting the release branch and staging it for deploy? Who has to be present during the release (in case of catastrophe)? At the meeting we agree on these items, confirm availability of resources and write down the commitments.
Reminders: In addition, there’s always a bunch of critical things that we run through to make sure whoever is responsible knows they’re responsible. This is the “checklist” part of the meeting and it’s brief. It’s also not entirely serious — the last few items on the list belong to me and include “Savour SUPREME EXECUTIVE POWER” and “Acquire cake FOR ALL”.
[NOTE: take a moment and appreciate those last all-caps. They got added to the check-list after a release day on which I managed to scrounge up a slice of delicious cake for myself, but there wasn't any for the people actually doing the work. Since my item said only "Acquire cake", I was able to argue (tongue in cheek) that I'd accomplished my assigned task, when really it had just slipped through the cracks. Folks took exception and the issue came up at the Retrospective (more on THAT directly below)].
Which reminds me that a few bits of silliness here and there go a LONG way to keeping any meeting or process less painful for everyone involved. Everyone perks up when they get a chance to chuckle.
That’s the current state our Release Planning process — although it’s always evolving, based on what we learn. The other side of our virtuous circle is the another meeting: the Release Retrospective meeting.
On the day after each release (Thursday), everyone involved comes to a Release Retrospective. This meeting is run with sticky notes — in two colours. One colour is for Things That Were Good, and another colour is for Things That Were Not Really So Good. We spend ten or fifteen minutes just writing stuff down on these sticky notes and putting them up on the wall. No discussion, everyone with sticky notes just jotting down observations and posting them up for everyone to see.
This style of idea generation accomplishes two things. First, it takes away any sense of blame or finger-pointing. We don’t write, “Corey forgot to order the celebratory cake,” – we write, “There was no cake.” That makes it easier for me to voluntarily take ownership of the failure, since I can’t deny that there was no cake. No energy is wasted trying to defend oneself because oneself is never under attack. Second, it keeps us from dwelling on any single item just yet – we don’t argue about whether or not someone’s suggestion is worthy or silly (indeed, a good number of silly suggestions get put up on the wall each time), we just take the written note and put it up on the wall for everyone to see.
Once the flurry of suggestions and ideas has settled down, we go through each and every one and assign it to someone present.
We never just shrug and say, “Well, that’s just how things are.” If something’s not working right, we have to take action to make it better — which means somebody has to be responsible for making it happen. If a good thing happened by accident, we need to find a way to make that becomes part of our process. People volunteer to take responsibility for things until there aren’t any more. Often, of course, multiple notes really point to a single underlying cause, and so the task of assigning notes to team members isn’t always as daunting as it looks.
Things only change when someone is made responsible for creating that change. We make sure every change item has an owner, so that we can follow up and make sure it gets done.
Each meeting is about assigning owners to actions. At the Release Planning meeting we assign the deploy work that needs doing, and at the Release Retrospective we assign the “meta-work” that determines the deploy work that needs doing. Each Release Planning meeting incorporates new tactics that emerged from the previous Release Retrospective, and each Release Retrospective we go over the impact of the new Release Planning process. We’re not quite at the point where releases NEVER get a little exciting at one point or another, but it’s very rare for us to get surprised on a Wednesday morning.
And it’s now my duty to acquire cake for everyone on the team, not just myself. Sometimes my processes don’t always work to my advantage, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I’m a team player.
So, what we may have failed to mention to all our customers and readers is that every year around this time we shut down the office and support for the main statutory holidays (Christmas – December 25th, Boxing Day – December 26th [which resulted in our office closed yesterday the 28th this year] and New Year’s – January 1st).
The rest of the days most of us are taking some time off to relax, but all the newbies are providing the customer support everyone is used to. It is a rite of passage of sorts for everyone who starts here at FreshBooks that they have to come in to the office to answer the phones, respond to emails and questions on the forums. If you want to meet some of our bright eyed newbies, give us a call this week!
For anyone that needed help yesterday, I apologize for the late notice, but we are back now!
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