It has been close to a year now that I've incorporated my new company, Mergify. I've been busy, and I barely wrote anything about it so far. Now is an excellent time to take a break and reflect a bit on what happened during those last 12 months.

What problem does Mergify solve?Mergify is a powerful automation engine for GitHub pull requests. It allows you to automate everything and especially merging. You write rules, and it handles the rest.

Example of rule matching returned in GitHub checks

For example, let's say you want your pull request to be merged, e.g., once your CI passes and the pull request has been approved. You just write such a rule, and our engine merges the pull request as soon as it's ready.We also deal with more advanced use cases. For instance, we provide a merge queue so your pull requests are merged serially and tested by your CI one after another avoiding any regression in your code.Our goal is to make pull request management and automation easy. You can use your bot to trigger a rebase of your pull requests, or a backport to a different branch, just with a single comment.

Some people like to make bots talk to each other.

A New AdventureMergify is the first company that I ever started. I did run some personal businesses before, created non-profit organizations, built FOSS projects but I never created a company from scratch, even less with an associate.Indeed, I've chosen to build the company with my old friend Mehdi. We've known each others for 7 years now, and have worked together all that time on different open-source projects. Having worked with each other for so long has probably been a critical factor in the success of our venture so far.I had little experience sharing the founding seats with someone, and tons of reading seemed to indicate that it would be a tough ride. Picking the right business partner(s) can be a hard task. Luckily, after working so much time together, Mehdi and I both know our strengths and weaknesses well enough to be able to circumvent them. On the other hand, we both have similar backgrounds as software engineers. That does not help to cover all the hats you need to wear when building a company. Over time, we found arrangements to cover most of those equally between us.We don't have any magical advice to give on this. As in every relationship, communication is the key, and the #1 factor of success.

Getting UsersI don't know if we got lucky, but we got users and customers pretty early. We used a few cooperative projects as guinea pigs first, and they were brave enough to try our service and give us feedback. No repository has been harmed during this first phase!Then, as soon as we managed to get our application on the GitHub Marketplace, we saw a steady number of users coming to us.This has been fantastic as it allowed us to get feedback rapidly. We set up a form asking users for feedback after they used Mergify for a couple of weeks. What we hear is that users were happy, that the documentation was confusing and that some features were buggy or missing. We planned all of those ideas as our future work in our roadmap, using the principles we described a few months ago.

How we handle our roadmap for Mergify

Whatever you re building a company, a product, or a house a time comes where you need planning. Pushing random buttons to move forward does not work anymore. You need to take a step back to

Julien DanjouMergify

If you're curious, you can read this article.

We tried various strategies to get new users, but so far, organic growth has been our #1 way of onboarding new users. Like many small startups out there, we're not that good at marketing and executing strategies.We provide our service for free for open-source projects We are now powering many organizations, such as Mozilla, Amazon Web Services, Ceph and Fedora.

Working with GitHubWorking with GitHub has been complicated. When you build an application for a marketplace, your business is entirely dependent on the platform you develop for both in terms of features and quality of service.In our case, we hit quite many bugs with GitHub. Their support has mostly been fast to answer, but some significant issues are still opened months later. The truth is that the GitHub API could deserve more love and care from GitHub. For example, their GraphQL API is a work in progress for years and miss out many essential features.

GitHub service status is not always green.

We dealt and still deal with all those issues. It obviously impacts our operations and decreases our overall velocity. We regularly have to find new ways to sidestep GitHub limitations.You have no idea how we wished for GitHub to be open-source. The idea of not having access to their code and understand how it works is so frustrating that we publish our engine as an open-source project. That allows all of our users to see how it works and even propose enhancements.

Automate all the wayWe're a tiny startup, and we decided to bootstrap our company. We never took any funding. From the beginning, it has been clear to us that we had to think and act like we had no resources. We're built around a scarcity mindset. Every decision we make is based on the assumption that we basically are very limited in terms of money and time.We basically act like any wrong choice we do could (virtually) kill the company. We only do what is essential, we ship fast, and we automate everything.For example, we have built our whole operation about CI/CD systems, and pushing any new fix or feature in production is done in a matter of minutes. It's not uncommon for us to push a fix from our phone, just by reviewing some code or editing a file.

GrowthWe're extremely happy with our steady growth and more users using our service. We now manage close to 30k repositories and merge 15k pull requests per month for our users.That's a lot of mouse clicks saved!If you want to try Mergify yourself, it's a single click log-in using your GitHub account. Check it out!

A little more than 3 months after our latest minor release, here is the new major version of Gnocchi, stamped 2.0.0. It contains a lot of new and exciting features, and I'd like to talk about some of them to celebrate! You may notice that this release happens in the middle of the OpenStack release cycle. Indeed, Gnocchi does not follow that 6-months cycle, and we release whenever our code is ready. That forces us to have a more iterative approach, less disruptive for other projects and allow us to achieve a higher velocity. Applying the good old mantra release early, release often. Documentation This version features a large documentation update. Gnocchi is still the only OpenStack server project that implements a "no doc, no merge" policy, meaning any code must come with the documentation addition or change included in the patch. The full documentation is included in the source code and available online at gnocchi.xyz. Data split & compression I've already covered this change extensively in my last blog about timeseries compression. Long story short, Gnocchi now splits timeseries archives in small chunks that are compressed, increasing speed and decreasing data size. Measures batching support Gnocchi now supports batching, which allow submitting several measures for different metric in a single request. This is especially useful in the context where your application tends to cache metrics for a while and is able to send them in a batch. Usage is fully documented for the REST API. Group by support in aggregation One of the most demanded features was the ability to do measure aggregation no resource, using a group by type query. This is now possible using the new groupby parameter to aggregation queries. Ceph backend optimization We improved the Ceph back-end a lot. Mehdi Abaakouk wrote a new Python binding for Ceph, called Cradox, that is going to replace the current Python rados module in the subsequent Ceph releases. Gnocchi makes usage of this new module to speed things up, making the Ceph based driver really, really faster than before. We also implemented asynchronous data deletion, which improves performance a bit. The next step will be to run some new benchmarks like I did a few months ago and compare with the Gnocchi 1.3 series. Stay tuned!

We've been hard working with the Gnocchi team these last months to store your metrics, and I guess it's time to show off a bit. So far Gnocchi offers scalable metric storage and resource indexation, especially for OpenStack cloud but not only, we're generic. It's cool to store metrics, but it can be even better to have a way to visualize them! Prototyping We very soon started to build a little HTML interface. Being REST-friendly guys, we enabled it on the same endpoints that were being used to retrieve information and measures about metric, sending back text/html instead of application/json if you were requesting those pages from a Web browser. But let's face it: we are back-end developers, we suck at any kind front-end development. CSS, HTML, JavaScript? Bwah! So what we built was a starting point, hoping some magical Web developer would jump in and finish the job. Obviously it never happened. Ok, so what's out there? It turns out there are back-end agnostic solutions out there, and we decided to pick Grafana. Grafana is a complete graphing dashboard solution that can be plugged on top of any back-end. It already supports timeseries databases such as Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. That was largely enough for that my fellow developer Mehdi Abaakouk to jump in and start writing a Gnocchi plugin for Grafana! Consequently, there is now a basic but solid and working back-end for Grafana that lies in the grafana-plugins repository. With that plugin, you can graph anything that is stored in Gnocchi, from raw metrics to metrics tied to resources. You can use templating, but no annotation yet. The back-end supports Gnocchi with or without Keystone involved, and any type of authentication (basic auth or Keystone token). So yes, it even works if you're not running Gnocchi with the rest of OpenStack. It also supports advanced queries, so you can search for resources based on some criterion and graphs their metrics. I want to try it! If you want to deploy it, all you need to do is to install Grafana and its plugins, and create a new datasource pointing to Gnocchi. It is that simple. There's some CORS middleware configuration involved if you're planning on using Keystone authentication, but it's pretty straightforward just set the cors.allowed_origin option to the URL of your Grafana dashboard. We added support of Grafana directly in Gnocchi devstack plugin. If you're running DevStack you can follow the instructions which are basically adding the line enable_service gnocchi-grafana. Moving to Grafana core Mehdi just opened a pull request a few days ago to merge the plugin into Grafana core. It's actually one of the most unit-tested plugin in Grafana so far, so it should be on a good path to be merged in the future and have support of Gnocchi directly into Grafana without any plugin involved.