Dear community,
It’s the end of the year, everyone is doing their best to finish their work. Probably your house is nicely decorated with a Christmas tree and lots of lights. We’re all looking forward to leave 2019 behind and get new energy to make 2020 at least as great as 2019.
In the Netherlands it’s a tradition to vote for the “TOP2000”. A music event, with 2000 numbers, selected by all voters. It starts on 25th of December, and ends at 31 december at 23.59.30. As most years, the list and therefore the year will end with Queen’s Bohemian Rapsody. Personally, the Top 2000 marks the end of the year for me.
This year we’ll let our community also create a Top. However, this is only a Top 6 instead of a Top 2000. The feature voting is open again, and this time we selected 6 features to vote on. A little less than usual. This allows us to keep some focus and for you it’s easier to select your top three. You don’t have to search in a list of 100 issues, with the possibility we don’t do it at all. So please vote and let us know which of the features we should work on Q1 2020.
go to: Feature Voting
Another thing we’d like to announce is the new Blueriq Christmas puzzle. You can find the model and the assignment here:
https://my.blueriq.com/display/DOC/Blueriq+Christmas+Puzzle
I added a license to the page, and the temporary possibility for everyone the download the latest Blueriq version.
Enjoy making the puzzle, send in the answers and claim your prize in the new year. There will be a meetup 30-01-2020, so save the date.
We wish you all the best, have a wonderful Christmas, a safe and festive New Year's Eve and above all, we wish you all the best for 2020.
Blueriq 12 is out for half a year now. The first months after the release it has been quiet, as we expected. Teams were experimenting with the new software and planning the migration. With the Blueriq 12 release, you also have to do a Java upgrade, as Java 8 has reached the end of public updates in January 2019. So, a few customers made a plan, arranged the correct platform support and then started migrating to the new version.
Why a race?
Around the summer we heard from two customers they planned the migration. There was good contact between the customer and support. During the first steps to 12 a few bugs were found. One of the customers made a step from Blueriq 9 to Blueriq 12. In the 4 years between those versions, a lot of functionality was added and some behaviour has been changed. This was an extra challenge for this particular customer. In October it was a neck and neck race which customer was going to be the first to get in production with Blueriq 12. And then came the third. When hearing about two customers racing to be the first with 12, the third customer decided to sprint and get to 12 first. Congratulations.
We now have one customer live with 12.5, one with 12.6 and our own academy just migrated to 12.7. From support perspective I had a lot of fun working with our customers to facilitate their migration to Blueriq 12. We learned a lot from each other and also celebrated successes together.
Reflecting on this period, we thought it would be fun to give more insight in the race to 12. We created a physical board, with a logo for every customer and added columns for Blueriq versions. Each time a customer successfully migrates to a higher version, we move their card to the correct column. This gives us, and our customer success managers more insight into which versions are in use.
As we want to encourage our customers to migrate to the latest versions, we want to give a price to the winners of this race. In December, Blueriq 12.9 will be released. All customers that are at least on Blueriq 12.9 at 31 March 2020 will be selected, and from the selected customer we randomly pick one to win a price. What the price is will be kept a secret for now, the only thing I can say is that Support and our PO’s will join this event.
Enjoy the race, and keep the pace up.
At Blueriq we care for quality of our product. Of course we have our unit tests and regression tests. Last week we also performed a penetration test (pentest). A pentest is an authorized simulated cyber attack on, in this case, our runtime system. The test is performed to identify both weaknesses or vulnerabilities, as well as strengths. We hired a security agency to do this and they spent three days searching for vulnerabilities and to try and hack our system. The result of this research is a vulnerability report with advise on where we can improve our security.
We can share good news with you, after three days of investigation no serious vulnerabilities were found. We have a few minor things we can improve, but overall the runtime was assessed to be secure. Of course, this doesn’t mean we can lean back now. The last few years we spent a lot of effort to come this far, and we’ll keep improving our platform. We are planning to have a pentest periodically to make sure we keep delivering a secure platform.
This pentest was performed on our platform with typical models that cover a lot of Blueriq’s functionality. As our customers want to make sure their security is on par as well, we teamed up with one of them. In the near future there will be a pentest conducted to assess how secure their Blueriq application is. We are looking forward to see those results.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, we have several ways of testing at Blueriq. Even more testing methods are being used by our teams on the different Blueriq projects. Over the years we gathered useful knowledge and we decided that we want to share this knowledge in an internal knowledge session. However, as this might be useful for every Blueriq community member, we’re going to invite you for this session. Keep an eye out on your mailbox and the community, as the invite will be sent soon and there’s only a limited number of spots.
That’s it for this week. Please reach out to us if you have any questions.
This week is the 25 anniversary of the popular sitcom FRIENDS. The legendary "How You Doing" spoken by Joey is always on my mind while writing these words.
But really, how are you doing? holiday season is over, new plans are made for next year and all budgets are allocated these months. We have only one week left in the third quarter and have a roadmap ready for Q4.
Next week is our quarterly demo, to show everyone what awesome things we did the last quarter and what we achieved by putting so much effort in our work. We solved a lot of bugs and our first customers are migrating to Blueriq 12.
Partly, this is cause for celebration. However, it makes us also think about how to deliver value faster. we are really working hard to develop new features and fixing bugs as soon as possible in the lastest 11 and 12. But when not even a single customer is in production with our 12 version, it means that 90% of the effort we put in our work for the last 5 months haven't reached the customers. That's kinda harsh. Please reach out to us how we can make migrating easier, why is it so hard to do on your project? what's the reason you're still working on an old version? we're not developing on Blueriq 10 since one and a half year. it makes me a little sad to see this, because I see about 20 people working everyday to add value to our product. So again, please reach out and tell us your story, maybe we can learn from you or help you.
This concludes this weeks blog. We're really looking forward to hear from you.
Hi All,
The results are in, thank you all for voting again.
we made a result page were you can see the top results for this quarter.
you can find it here:
The voting page is closed. We'll open it again for next quarter.
We'll let you know which requests we''ll pick up. Or which one's we won't do and tell you why.
Hi All,
The second feature voting is already open for 2 weeks.
unfortunatly, only 3 people have voted in this 2 weeks. The feature voting will be open until the end of this week.
This quarter the requests are reduced from 150 to +- 90.
Please take a little time, and make sure you vote.
We'll refine them as we did last quarter and try to make a good solution for the desired wish.
Here in The Netherlands it’s what we call “cucumber time”. That time of year the rest of the world calls something like the off-season. It’s quite calm. Often, this time of year is perfect for doing a (test) migration. Too many colleagues left the office for a well deserved holiday, so new functions have to wait until everyone comes back. From support perspective we see this as well. We see a drop in the amount of support requests. So if you’re planning a migration, please do a try out in the upcoming weeks. We’re available to help, and both you and we can work on it with less pressure.
We’ve also past the half year mark. So it’s time for making reports. I won’t bother you with all the statistics, but a few are quite interesting. Last year (whole 2018) you reported 387 Support requests in total. The first half of this year we are already on a total of 236. And we think this is a good thing. We see our customers are migrating and asking questions about newer versions.
From those 236 issues, actually 61 bugs were bugs that we solved by doing a commit in code. This doesn’t mean the other bugs weren’t real bugs, but we might have solved them earlier or we helped with your configuration for example. The percentage of the first half of this year is 25.8%. The total percentage of last year was 23.3% so it’s quite similar.
If you’re interested in a visit from support to talk about anything we can help with, let me know. I’d like to visit your project.
Greetings,
Paul Heiner
Customer support manager
Good afternoon everyone. This time I’m writing you from the beautiful Cluj in Romania, where it’s actually a bit colder than it is in the Netherlands. I’m visiting our colleagues from Yonder to meet them, learn from them, hear their vision on support and bring information on what’s going on in at HQ. It are a few intensive days, but also really nice. We shared our thoughts on the latest Blueriq developments and the new stuff we’re creating, and what we have in mind how they can help us.
We started of with a small presentation about support. I think it’s pretty important to have a Blueriq wide vision, and as our colleagues from yonder are part of the team, their vision is as important as any other. The session lasted for over 2 hours. We had a lot of discussion and heard a lot of ideas, remarks and warnings. It’s my job now to summarize these ideas, see what we can adopt and were we have to make different decisions. Also discussing the new feature request process and discussing the feature request that’s being picked up by Yonder really had added value.
Our architect came with us to explain what he’s doing to the SDK, and which decisions are made. Also, one of our developers came with us to give a presentation about new chosen technologies to make the life of our developers and with that the business engineers much easier. Of course, when we have something to show, we’ll present it to you as soon as possible.
Of course, as we’ve never met before but work together for 9 months now, we also had a nice evening program with drinks and fun. This Friday everyone will be home again and we can look back on a really nice, exhausting and valuable week.
Warm greetings from Support
Actually, today is already the last day of May. A lot of colleagues have the day of today, enjoying their long weekend due to Acension Day. But not Support, Support is always here for you!
The end of May also means that Summer is coming. A good time to look back on the first months of the year, but also deciding what we’re going to pick up the next few months. These months are always a little puzzle, as summer vacation is approaching. Planning all the work, with enough space for our colleagues to get their well deserved vacation, is slightly more difficult.
About looking back, how did you experience the Blueriq Meetup? We enjoyed it very much. Lovely to see that amount of people (+ - 70) coming to our headquarters. Personally I was also exited to cook for so many people. It was the biggest group we’ve ever catered. I hope you all learned something and heard what you came for. Otherwise, you can always send in new questions.
Last week also ended the first period to vote for features in the new feature voting. We want to thank all of you for voting, and also for the feedback we received. You can view the results on the feature voting page. We’ll try to work on all your feedback before the next voting session starts.
Rest me noting more than to wish you all a good weekend. For those who are working today, you’re almost there.
p.s.
Want to share something yourself? Please contact Support@blueriq.com and we’ll share your story.
Welcome June
Hi everyone. Hopefully you’ve all noticed we have released Blueriq 12. We know the first customers are updating already and experiencing the latest features. Download it, help us and yourself! Keep up with the pace and don’t fall behind. Having any kind of trouble? Please let us know, we’re here to help you.
Talking about Features.. as some of you already noticed we’re working on Feature Voting again. Some of you requested access already, you patience is rewarded. This week everyone gets access. We tried to prepare as well as possible, but haven’t completely finished. Nonetheless you can start voting on your favorite features. Even though we can’t fulfill all requests, please keep submitting them! Some of the input has given us new ideas for other features or improvements. We hope to make the process better, and keep up with your amount of requests. Feel free to encourage others to vote for your features!
Last but not least, 16 May is the Blueriq Meetup. For those of you who registered, see you Thursday! For those who haven’t, we’ll post a new blog and some photos after the event!
Today we released Blueriq 12! Checkout the release notes and have fun using it!
What’s the most terrible about spring and summer? You get annoyed by all the bugs cycling around your head am I right? Here at Blueriq we figured that we should lend a hand. Last week we held a Bugsquash week. Goal? Kill as many bugs as possible in just one week. The results are amazing. Our teams worked hard to score the most points and win a prize, but were also helping each other where needed. The result? We closed 111 Bugs. Some bugs were old and were already fixed in the newest versions, some bugs were old but still there and some bugs were pretty new and are now fixed right before release 12 comes out.
Yeah, you read this well! Release 12 is coming! The last CVE’s are fixed and the performance test is running. Keep an eye out on the customers page so you can download it as soon as we make it available. Get your quick hands on, and ask all your questions on may the 16th, at our Blueriq Meetup. If you haven’t registered yet, please do (https://go.blueriq.com/register-form-blueriq-meetup-may-2019)
Enjoy your Easter. Remember, if someone asks you who was first, the chicken or the egg? You can always answer the easter bunny. Because with Blueriq, you make your own rules!
Dear Blueriq Friends,
Carnaval season is over, everyone is sober again and we are working really hard to finish Blueriq 12. The (technical) webinar is already planned. In case you missed it, you can register for the webinar here: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/9089974185934701579
As sunny as the weather was while writing the last post, as rainy is it now. Remember the times when you were young? Cosy and warm inside while the rain drops hit the window, playing 8-bit games on the NES. That nostalgic feeling. You can relive those times with Blueriq soon. Our beloved colleague Mike wanted to see for himself how easy it is to create a new theme based on our Material Theme and the Redcow framework. Last Cool Coding Weekend, a weekend for our developers with lots of food, drinks and of course time to create lovely new things, Mike spent just under two days to create a new theme. He won the first prize by achieving this. It’s incredible how fast you can rewrite the code and create something in your own personal style. The only thing we still have to do is create a build server for it. When that’s done, you can view Blueriq in an awesome 8-bit theme! We’ll keep you posted next update.
If you’d like to talk with us about the Blueriq version you’re using, about how our product can be improved or learn from other customers, please note May 16th in your calendar. The official invitation has yet to be sent, but we’re organizing a Blueriq Meetup. At the meetup there will be presentations, discussions and lots of time to chat with us or with other customers. And of course there will be delicious food.
If you have any questions, comments or other business you want to share with us, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re here to help you.
With kind regards,
On behalf of Blueriq, Paul Heiner
The weather is beautiful, spring is in the air. A sign that beautiful things are coming our and your way.
At the Blueriq headquarters our teams are working hard to deliver new value to our product. Of course we’re still delivering value to Blueriq 11, but the teams are also working hard to create Blueriq 12. The release is planned in the beginning of Q2, we'll keep you posted.
In case you missed it, Blueriq has been working hard on the Material Theme, based on Angular. Since release 11.7 the Material Theme is the default theme. So, if you want to check it out, download and install the latest 11 version and get a hands-on.
If you read all this, you almost can’t deny this is reason for a party! We’re planning to organize a meetup, so save the date for 16 May. All community members are invited. More information will be coming to you soon.
Talking about a party... Carnaval season is just around the corner. A five day party, mostly celebrated in the south of the Netherlands. Of course, as Blueriq HQ is situated in one of the capital cities of carnaval, a group of collegues will head to town. ‘s-Hertogenbosch will be renamed to “Oeteldonk” and all its citizens will dress up the same way. Blueriq created its own emblem, part of the Oeteldonk outfit (as seen in the picture). Cheers to you all!
If you have any improvements on the product, or on our service, please reach out!
Dear Customer,
Unfortunately the Business Model Insight has reached the end of it's lifecycle. This decision is made in Summer 2018.
You should be informed by a colleague or a Customer Succes Mananger in the meantime.
Since 01-01-2019 it isn't possible to download the BMI anymore.
If you have any further questions, feel free to contact your Customer Succes Manager or the Blueriq Support Desk.
With kind regards, on behalf of Blueriq Support, Paul Heiner