Permission To Write
TLDR: We’re adding issue:write and pull_request:write access to Octobox so that you can comment on issues and pull requests from Octobox.io (or your own instance). We’re also helping onboard new users and adding auto-scaling to get you moving quicker.
To get you up to speed: back in October Andrew and I left Tidelift to work full-time on Octobox, in November we launched Octobox on the GitHub Marketplace and last month we announced a change in the way Octobox.io will be priced in order to create a more sustainable future for the project.
Today we’re releasing a number of features for Octobox and Octobox.io that improves the workflow for existing users and eases the on-boarding process for new users.
But first, a quick update: Octobox.io now hosts 12,000 users. Our GitHub App has been installed nearly 1,000 times. We are currently processing ~50,000 notifications and ~180,000 updates (webhooks) each day to keep you focussed and productive.
Despite this the project is still nowhere near financially sustainable.
Last month we saw both sides of the reaction to our pricing change. Some of you were incredibly supportive (thanks!), some of you argued that the price was too high. We understand both points of view of course, but we would like to restate our thinking: that doing this lowers the cost of operating Octobox.io by incentivising some to host their own instances, it increases the contributor and maintainer base by bringing some users closer to the mechanics of operating an instance of Octobox and, it raises income to support maintainers like Andrew and myself. All of these are good things for Octobox and its community. That said, we’re continually seeking to increase the utility and value that Octobox provides. Which is where we get to the fun stuff…
Conversations
The beady-eyed among you may have noticed that, back in December we launched ‘thread view’ into Beta. Thread view built issue and pull request conversations right into Octobox, so you can keep focused in a single tab while getting the extra context you need:
One element of thread view that was missing in our initial release was replying. So today we are bringing thread-view out of Beta and launching conversations as one, near-complete experience. Yes, I hear you say ‘it doesn’t support commit-level comments and reviews’, but we’ll cover that later.
Auto Scaling With HireFire
It may seem like a feature only developers would appreciate, but the reality is that, as a small, under-funded community supporting a growing user base, we have to make sure that our infrastructure is as lean as possible. We typically run our servers as hot as they’ll (reliably) stand, ‘perfect utilisation’ is often the goal. But we have a rather peaky pattern of usage: large organisations add Octobox.io to their workflow and we find ourselves indexing tens of thousands of issues, PRs and, conversations which can lead to performance hits at times. So we’ve added HireFire to our stack to auto-scale up our infrastructure when the queues get long, meaning you can get on with getting on. Which leads me nicely to…
Onboarding Using Pinned Searches
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Pia Mancini, CEO of Open Collective and one of the most impactful women working in open source today (vote for her if you agree). Part of that interview centred around a ‘getting started’ flow for people who open up Octobox for the first time.
Talking it through I realised that both Andrew and myself have two ‘pinned searches’ (launched back in November) that we regularly use to do one of two things:
- Highlight everything that was merged, closed or otherwise ready to be archived.
- Highlight any pull-requests that are in a mergeable state, which informs each day’s work.
and that these particular searches are exactly what an over-worked GitHub user needs in order to cut through the chaff and focus down on what matters, especially when they first log in. So today we’re adding these two pinned searches by default: to ensure everyone using Octobox can get going quickly, and continue to make the most of their time each day.
So, What’s Next?
With these changes we feel that we now have enough of GitHub integrated now to make the future of Octobox less about which parts of GitHub it supports and more about our own users, who often have needs that are not supported by GitHub’s services.
So we’re going to be doing more to reach out to you for ideas, feedback and sharing our research findings. As usual you can reach out to us on twitter, gitter or by email or if you’re lucky enough to have the time you can get stuck in as a contributor, we’d love to share our work with you.
To conclude: this is a very long post explaining why we’re asking for additional permissions on your repositories, but we hope it can also be the start of writing the future of Octobox together 🙌
