Garret Heaton

Saint Patrick’s Day downtime

By Garret Heaton | 11 months ago | 2 Comments |

Yesterday afternoon while everyone was enjoying the new (shamrock) and (greenbeer) emoticons one of our Amazon EC2 instances suddenly stopped responding. This particular instance helped serve our website and chat service and had a decent percentage of chat clients connected to it. We’re not sure why it went down, but it was EBS-based so we think it may be related to the issues Reddit and others were experiencing.

Whatever the cause, we should be able to recover from server failures. Normally the users connected to the failed server would be briefly disconnected before automatically reconnecting to another server. Unfortunately the other services in our chat cluster weren’t properly detecting the failed instance and continued to send it requests which would then fail. Instead of trying to manually correct this unfamiliar failure state and cause more harm we decided to restart all the chat services. This is when most users noticed that we were having trouble.

Having everyone reconnect shouldn’t be too big a problem but we’ve been growing an awful lot lately and had more users connected than ever before (although today is looking even bigger!) The load caused by everyone reconnecting was too much for our existing servers to bear and everything slowed to a crawl. We had essentially triggered a denial-of-service attack against ourselves – not good. After about 15 minutes we were able to process all the requests and service returned to normal. Total service interruption: about 1 hour.

Here is what we’ll be fixing.

  1. Increasing our capacity so that server failures affect a smaller percentage of users and we can recover more quickly.
  2. Making sure our clustered chat services properly handle the failure case we experienced.
  3. Optimizing the client reconnection flow so it generates less load.

Thanks to all our users for your patience and understanding yesterday. We know HipChat is an integral part of your workflow and that reliability is the most important feature we can provide.

Garret Heaton

Check out the the Lean Startup Bundle from AppSumo

By Garret Heaton | 11 months ago | 0 Comments |

Last year at SXSW we spread the word about HipChat by giving away a ton of tshirts and meeting as many people as possible. This year we’ve partnered with AppSumo to offer 6 months of free HipChat to new users who purchase the Lean Startup Bundle for SXSW ($99). The bundle includes deals on almost 30 other web services, including Twilio, SauceLabs, and LessAccounting which we use to run HipChat.

So go check it out. We’d love to help your new startup succeed.

Garret Heaton

Special treatment for GitHub URLs

By Garret Heaton | 11 months ago | 1 Comment |

HipChat now detects certain GitHub URLs and shows additional data about them:

Linking to a repo. Users, issues, commits, and Gists are also supported.

We were surprised to learn that github.com is the 3rd most popular domain for shared links on HipChat, just behind youtube.com and twitter.com (which we already support). Combine this fact with their nice API and we knew we had to hook this up.

Happy coding!

Garret Heaton

Scheduled Maintenance Tonight at 11PM PST

By Garret Heaton | 11 months ago | 0 Comments |

Update (23:20) - Maintenance was completed successfully. Thank you for your patience!

We’ll be shutting things down for about 30 minutes this evening beginning at 11PM PST (23:00) in order to upgrade some of our core systems. All users will be disconnected and unable to chat during this time. The website will remain available.

Additionally, all desktop client users will be prompted with a required update before signing in after the maintenance. We haven’t had a required update since mid-2010 so depending on when you signed up you may see a large number of performance improvements and bug fixes. This new update also contains support for some new features we’ll be releasing in the future.

For the tech curious: we’re increasing our memcached cache sizes, upgrading to the latest Redis, and moving a few systems to more powerful machines in order to increase our capacity. We’ve seen massive growth lately and March is looking to be another very busy month.

Thanks to all our users for your patience and support. We’ll update this post and post on Twitter when the maintenance is complete.

Pete Curley

Introducing HipChat for iPhone and iPad

By Pete Curley | 11 months ago | 11 Comments |

Today we’re happy to announce the release of our native iPhone and iPad apps. We want to thank all of our beta testers and customers who have been waiting patiently. We’re passionate about accessibility and this is a big step towards getting HipChat on every operating system and device out there. The apps are free and available in the App Store.


The app has just about everything you’d expect:

  • Group chat and 1-to-1 messaging
  • Inline previews for images, Twitter, and YouTube, etc.
  • Receive push notifications for 1-to-1 chats, room invites, and when you’re mentioned in a room
  • Other users will see you as being on an iPhone

If you have any bugs or feedback please contact us.

One more thing…

We’ve also added a new emoticon: (jobs) . Enjoy!

Chris Rivers

Client Update: Feb. 24, 2011

By Chris Rivers | 11 months ago | 2 Comments |

After working through some particularly tricky bugs reported by some of our users, we have a new client build available for anyone who’s looking to have the latest and greatest. Also included in the update are a couple requests from users: microphone/camera selectors for video chat and text-manipulation shortcuts on Mac and Linux.

How to check for updates.

Release notes below:

  • User request: Added selectors for choosing camera/microphone in video chat window
  • User request: Added ctrl-k/y/f/b shortcuts to Mac/Linux input area
  • Using @all to mention everyone in a room should now correctly trigger notifications
  • Updated notification sound to be clearer and better quality
  • Fixed an issue which occasionally caused text to appear slowly in the input box
  • Fixed an issue where clicking switching to profile in 1-on-1 chats wouldn’t show the profile data
  • Long lines of unbroken text (e.g. json data) should wrap more appropriately now
  • Fixed ctrl-enter to add line breaks correctly in the middle of text
  • Added search functionality to private chat tabs
  • Fix tab index when dragging tabs around
  • Private chats will detect and preview image URLs correctly again (regression)
Pete Curley

Testing an iPhone app in limited connectivity? Hop on the train.

By Pete Curley | 12 months ago | 0 Comments |

Over the past few months we’ve been working on our highly anticipated iPhone app. I tend to be the harshest user of products so I took it upon myself to test the hell out of it. I also love reporting bugs to Chris who programmed it.

One of the difficult aspects of a communications app is that there are a lot of states you can be in: connecting, reconnecting, disconnecting, lost signal, weak signal, and combinations of all of those. Testing these different cases can be difficult. If I had an iPhone 4, I assume I could have just held it in my hand to reduce signal strength. However, I have a 3GS. I had to get creative.

I was taking the Caltrain from our Sunnyvale office up to San Francisco for a meeting and I noticed my phone signal was all over the place. It switched from WiFi, to Edge, to 3G, to WiFi, and back to Edge. I booted up HipChat and used it up and down the peninsula. What made this particularly effective was that I wasn’t doing use cases, I was trying to actually get work done with Garret and Chris. We found and fixed a lot of bugs we wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Pete Curley

We’re not like Yammer or Chatter, and we don’t want to be

By Pete Curley | 12 months ago | 16 Comments |

We go to a lot of networking events to pitch HipChat and there’s one question we always get: “Oh, so HipChat is like Yammer?” This is quickly cleared up by asking them if they know the difference between Twitter and AIM, which they do. I ask if they can imagine using something like Twitter to replace the IM tools they currently use with their coworkers (AIM/Google Talk/Yahoo!/Skype/IRC). It’s always a “no”.

I don’t blame them for not knowing the difference between all of these tools. I blame the hot space and all the buzzwords that get thrown around: team collaboration, real-time, social business, etc. Salesforce even has a competing product to Yammer called Chatter, despite the clear absence of any chat functionality. As soon as people hear that a company does some form of “communication for companies” they just throw them all in the same bucket. Well, let’s clear this mess up.

How is microblogging different than group chat and IM?

Microblogging (Yammer and Chatter) – the sharing of short status updates that can be directed to followers, groups, or individuals. It’s a nice  replacement for non-critical emails (think of your Facebook News Feed). For example, the CEO of a company wouldn’t email employees every piece of news about their competitors, but he might post it on Yammer so the people following him can see what’s on his mind.

Group chat and IM (HipChat) - real-time, synchronous chat with people or teams. Departments and teams can share code, files, and ideas to work and make decisions faster. It’s also a great replacement for face-to-face meetings.

Here’s an example of a recent team chat we had while shipping our new features page. Imagine if we had to collaborate on this through email or microblogging, it would have taken forever.


There is more than enough room for both IM and microblogging

Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of big companies can benefit from Yammer and Chatter. It’s a great way to keep everybody in the loop without blasting them with emails. They bridge the cultural divide between execs and the employees that follow them.

Nearly 100% of companies, regardless of size, need instant messaging and group chat. So although microblogging will be a part of how companies communicate in the future, I’d be betting heavy on IM and group chat (and we are).

Garret Heaton

What’s HipChat made of?

By Garret Heaton | 1 year ago | 0 Comments |

At meetups people are always asking questions like “Hey, what’s your stack?” or “What do you use for analytics?” It’s a great way to learn about worthwhile tools and services (and sometimes start a heated debate.) We thought it’d be fun to share our technology profile to satisfy your curiosity and support the awesome services we use.

Services

Languages

  • ActionScript – desktop client (AIR)
  • HTML/CSS/JavaScript – website
  • Objective-C – iPhone/iPad app (coming soon!)
  • PHP – website
  • Python – chat server and other services
  • Ruby – for Chef

Server software

Anything else you’d like to know? Have a tool we should check out? Please let us know.

Chris Rivers

Giving back – 5 reasons to be free for non-profits

By Chris Rivers | 1 year ago | 1 Comment |

(Hip) ChatAs some of you may know, we offer the HipChat Ultimate plan for free to non-profit chartiable organzations (note: this doesn’t include every non-profit, like schools and government institutions). While you could probably get dozens of reasons why this is a good or a bad idea, here are some of the top reasons we decided to work this way:

1. Charity

The work done by many non-profits is invaluable all over the world. Making it so those organizations can do their work better, easier, and faster is our way of giving back. Often, non-profit employees are separated by great distance (hosting events, providing charity to impoverished areas, etc.). Having a tool like HipChat can really come in handy when keeping everyone in the loop.

2. Exposure

Whenever we provide HipChat for free to non-profits, we ask only one thing: if you use it and like it, let other people know. Whether it be chatting at an event, a tweet, blog post, or forum thread, letting people know what helps you get work done is good for everyone involved. Lots of companies tout their sponsorship of non-profit events or associations, but without lots of cash in our bank account (yet!) philanthropy is a little beyond our scope. This is our own way of ‘sponsoring’ the good work that these organizations do.

3. Sometimes you get a paying customer

It’s true – some non-profits have lots of money. And sometimes those organizations will gladly pay for your product, especially if it’s a time-saver (and money-saver). To be clear though, we never demand that any qualified non-profits pay for HipChat.

4. Free feedback

Lots of non-profits are set up just like normal businesses. There are departments, teams, projects, etc. We’re always looking for feedback in everything we do and just like our paying customers, they offer it up.

5. It’s easy

Some people might say, “Well, you should make non-profits with money pay for HipChat. Only give it to the ones that can’t pay.” We’d agree with you, but in reality, it’s easier to offer it for free to anyone that fits the criteria. We’re here to help other businesses succeed and there are lots of companies that are willing to pay for HipChat. Our business isn’t going to live or die by getting a few more non-profits to pay for it.

Are you a non-profit looking for a communication tool?

Check here to make sure you meet the criteria, sign up for HipChat, then contact us to get the discount. That’s all there is to it!

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