2023 is coming to an end, which means it’s time to revisit what happened with the team and the project of dyrector.io in the past 12 months.
After the lengthy Christmas break with a full stomach and a couple extra kilograms the real surprise caught us blind-sided. The Full Stack platform featured dyrector.io in its highlights.
Team-wise the most notable event was our Minus 30 hike in the pleasant January weather, which was a great occasion to have a chat about both technology related and unrelated things, and also to taste some pálinka.
The first weeks of February were all about attending FOSDEM and the upcoming launch of dyrector.io on Product Hunt. On the day of the launch we made alpha access available.
Our Product Hunt launch turned out to be a shot at the buzzer, but we still did nice. With a launch 6 hours into the voting, we reached the #11 spot. The same day we made a new release and a demo video. Busier than planned, but we did good.
At the conference in Belgium, we were able to catch up with a lot of likeminded people eager to learn about open-source software.
At the same time, our teammate, Levi showed up in the local cloud meetup scene as organizer and a presenter, too. Another teammate of ours, Nándi was interviewed in the podcast series of Uptime Community about DevOps, ChatGPT, and open-source.
We doubled down on catering to a self-hosting audience in the first months of 2023, which helped us reach 300 stars on GitHub on the 3rd of March. We published a bunch of blog posts about self-hosting certain types of applications, which you can find here.
In March, we published our Awesome repository containing infrastructure related questions. We consider it useful when someone is onboarded to a new project maintaining infrastructure.
Another important event of the month was when Docker announced the end of Free Teams on Docker Hub. Backlash was inevitable and so was the organization backing out of their plans of monetizing Free Teams.
A portion of our team took a business trip in the UK to visit Hanover Displays at their HQ in Brighton. While Levi and Gopher was there, they paid a visit to the LEGO HQ for a meetup, as well.
After the trip in the UK, we went out of the office for a few days of team building when we could unwind with the whole team.
Levi attended KubeCon in Amsterdam, too, which turned out to be the funniest way to reach 420 stars on GitHub on April 20th. Trust me, we didn’t plan this whatsoever.
After a Q1 busy with refactoring and making dyrector.io’s code more efficient, we started to make new releases faster. The first step was making 0.4.0, which didn’t deliver any significant changes to functionality, but it was important to accelerate our release cycle in the long run.
At the same time, we published our roadmap on GitHub and added new issues to the repository.
We also made some new friends: ConfigCat reviewed the platform on their blog.
Release 0.5.0 was a special moment for our team. It was the first version in months that included new features. To celebrate this special moment, we went to Croatia to finish working on the new version and chill at the sunny beach.
This was the perfect way to kick off our summer. After the trip to Croatia, we were able to consistently release on a bi-weekly basis, shipping new features again and again.
After 0.5.0 dropped, we passed 512 stars on GitHub, or 1000000000 in binary.
One of the most significant features we added this year was the auto-deployment capability. The GitHub Actions compatible feature came out on July 14 in release 0.6.0.
A very pleasant surprise was when Nevo David mentioned dyrector.io in his blog post, which resulted in increased exposure and interest in the platform. In a few days we gained hundreds of stars on GitHub.
Even though it was the middle of the summer, we took no breaks. Between publishing new releases full of new features, we went to Lake Balaton to sail and Nándi and Geri even completed the Lake Balaton Cross Swimming.
At the end of July Levi attended WeAreDevelopers 2023 in Berlin.
The most significant change was an internal change: our teammate, Nándi moved to the Netherlands with his girlfriend. We officially became a remote-first company, while the rest of the team still showed up at the office every day. We had a goodbye party for him where we said farewell with a few cans of his favorite beverages for the road.
We launched dyrector.io on a new platform called Dev Hunt, which is an open-source Product Hunt alternative. With the help of our community, we were able to reach the #1 spot and the Developer Tool of the Week title that comes with it.
In other cloud-related news HashiCorp announced they’re changing their products’ license, including Terraform’s, to Business Source License, which sparked the foundation of OpenTF, which later was named OpenTofu.
The majority of August was spent on preparations for our Product Hunt launch in September. The date was set – September 8th. We knew a product like ours only has a chance of a significant result on a Friday.
The result: #6 in the daily rankings, top 50 in the weekly with around 260 votes. Definitely an impressive result with a heavily developer-focused tool.
In the meantime, Levi took care of networking: he appeared in the Follow The Pattern podcast, attended InfoBip’s Shift conference in Croatia, and went to Kubernetes Community Days in Vienna.
The biggest achievement of October in our household was a one-week sprint when more than half of the team was on vacation. Three teammates of ours joined forces, two developers and one marketer, to develop a complimentary product to dyrector.io.
We named this tool darklens, which makes Docker logs and container settings available in your browser. A week after the sprint we launched darklens on Product Hunt for an impressive #14 spot with 140 upvotes.
Over the summer, the whole team was able to snag developer tickets to Web Summit in Lisbon. Soon as we got the confirmation, we started planning our travel to Portugal. With a little sightseeing and networking at the conference, the week we spent in Lisbon turned out to be a blast. We made a lot of new connections.
One of the coolest things of the year was when people found the invitation card for our CTF puzzle and came to our Discord channel or stopped by to say hi at Web Summit.
The latest release of dyrector.io, 0.10.0 dropped in early December. You can find out more about it on GitHub.
That’s it for 2023. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
This blogpost was written by the team of dyrector.io. dyrector.io is an open-source continuous delivery & deployment platform with version management.
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