January 2023 Summaries

Shipping code on Friday can be beneficial and doesn't have to be bad, contrary to the common misconception that it leads to more weekend work. In fact, many companies are able to ship more code on Fridays while maintaining a low incident rate on Saturdays. This is because shipping on Friday provides a sense of closure for the week, motivates team productivity, and forces the development team to build a robust deployment pipeline. By focusing on prevention rather than avoidance, teams can reduce mistakes and learn from their errors, which leads to improved software quality and a more efficient release process.

Peerlist is a professional network that prioritizes technical skills and experience over credentials, where users can showcase their work across various platforms on a single page. Founded by Yogini Bende and her cofounder during the pandemic as a side project, Peerlist has gained significant traction with 600-700 users on its waitlist within months of launching, and has attracted angel investors, CTOs of startups and unicorns, and job posters. The platform has improved significantly since moving to Railway, reducing costs by over 80% while scaling user growth tenfold. With a stable release planned for March, Peerlist is introducing new features such as direct messages and an inbox, and plans to expand its hiring module and introduce a team profile feature. Users can sign up on the website `Peerlist.io` to create an account and explore more information about the platform.

Doppler has released a native integration with Railway, allowing users to manage and sync secrets within a Railway project. The integration provides features for automated secret rotation, observability, and version control. Doppler's platform is now more secure, thanks to the new connection with Railway. Users can easily integrate their projects by grabbing a Railway API Token and connecting them in their Doppler project. This integration aims to further secure infrastructure and provide users with a seamless experience.

Arcol is a real-time collaborative BIM tool in the AEC space that aims to help architects and engineers streamline the design process for better buildings. The company's software is designed to be built for the web, multiplayer, and highly performant, with a specialized 3D engine capable of handling complex geometry transformations. Arcol has gained backing from Figma's founding team and early investors, and is utilizing WebAssembly and Web Workers to achieve its ambitious goals. The company is currently in closed alpha and plans to open it up soon, with a waitlist of over 13,000 people eager to try the software.

Railway is an infrastructure company that provides instant application deployments to developers, focusing on speed and simplicity. The platform has seen tremendous growth, powering production deployments for 200,000+ users, with thousands more joining daily. Railway's success can be attributed to its ability to make infrastructure feel like magic, but now the company faces a BIG problem: scaling its product to meet the growing demand for complexity. To address this, Railway is introducing Railway v2, which will cover three dimensions of capability: service depth, environment breadth, and project height. The next leap forward in the capabilities of the product will include features such as private networking, multi-plugin support, horizontal scaling, persistent storage, regions, and jobs. Railway aims to make it possible for users to deploy any service or application with arbitrary complexity, seamlessly integrated into their existing infrastructure, in a few seconds.