June 2024 Update

Here’s what happened in the past weeks:

• We’re in the final stages of designing and creating content for our websites. Next up: writing ALL THE CSS.
• We rolled out a significant improvement to application config on Runway—spoiler alert: it’s now fully encrypted. This means encryption at REST (that means, including in the database). Huge shoutout to the brilliant minds behind Tink for creating a fantastic library that not only supports encryption but also key rotation and all the other essentials.
• We completed a ton of (security) updates across all components, including our CLI tool.
• We released updates to our metrics storage (thanks, Cortex Project), which we’ve been running for a few years. This powers all the fancy graphs for Runway and our existing products/integrations for our Docker customers.

Company-wise

One of the challenges for a small team is there’s always work and never enough time. Balancing the workload and deciding what to focus on is crucial, but not without its challenges. We’re constantly evolving and refining our decision-making process as we go.

For engineering-heavy teams, the instinct is often to solve everything by writing more software. Since we’re building a lot of software here, we decided to revamp our process a bit. We’ve introduced an RFD (Request For Discussion) process internally. The goal is to create a document that describes the entire implementation before it’s done. This adds greater technical detail, discusses potential alternatives, assesses risk and value, and considers the impact on our company, business, and customers.

Part of the RFD process is potentially publishing the results for others to learn from—hopefully making the community a little better. So expect some updates on that front in the coming months.

Shoutout to the folks at Oxide Computer Company for sharing and writing about their process. To say it’s been influential to us is an understatement.

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With temperatures approaching (or exceeding) 30°C, here’s to a happy summer from all of us in Berlin!

— Richard, Dennis, Till