Nimble Industries

AuthorColin Bartlett

Colin Bartlett is co-founder of Nimble Industries, creators of StatusGator, VimTricks, and many more. He has been building web applications, managing software development projects, and leading engineering teams for 22 years.

10 Essential DevOps Slack Apps

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Slack DevOps Apps in use

A major goal of DevOps is task and process automation. While total automation is possible to a large extent, DevOps engineers can’t just run a process and then leave it. They need to quickly react in the event of downtime and incidents. Usually, it’s important to react as fast as possible because downtime for even a few minutes can cost from $2,300 to $9,000 according to the Ponemon Institute in...

Status Page Webhooks: New and Improved!

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Sunrise

Since 2015, StatusGator has offered a unique solution for monitoring the status of hundreds of cloud services. By aggregating each service’s status page into a unified API, StatusGator provides the status of all your dependencies in a single place. Our status page webhooks solution was previously quite basic and limited in its capabilities. But we recently launched StatusGator webhooks v2...

How we collect feedback on VimTricks

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Four thumbs up for VimTricks

This really was the best decision we made before launching: We recently launched VimTricks, an email newsletter serving up tips and tricks about the Vim text editor. After reviewing many email platforms, we went with Substack for it’s easy of use and seemingly well-documented path to transitioning from free to paid newsletter. One problem we wanted to solve before we even launched was...

Introducing Organization Accounts

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Team of developer using a StatusGator organization account

Several times throughout the last five years of StatusGator, we have received requests for organizational accounts. As more and larger teams have joined, there’s been a steady increase in requests for multi-user accounts. We are proud to announce that StatusGator Organization accounts are now available on our Start Up plan and above. Our first implementation of this is quite simple:...

VimTricks: The Vim Newsletter

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VimTricks, the Vim newsletter

More than 2 years ago, Andy and I started a tiny little website called VimTricks on a whim. It was a place to showcase tidbits and tricks we had learned over our many years of using the Vim text editor. This month, we evolved VimTricks into something brand new: a vim newsletter. VimTricks is now a vim email newsletter that delivers new tips twice a week. We have both been using the Vim for many...

Status Page Monitoring in Microsoft Teams

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Microsoft Teams announcement

Exactly two years ago, Microsoft announced Teams at an elaborate launch event in New York City. Hailed by many as a “Slack killer“, Teams was positioned by Microsoft as a group messaging platform. It was clear from the start that they took aim directly at Slack and its numerous competitors. Slack even acknowledged the encroachment of Microsoft in a full page ad in the New York Times...

Mute Apocalyptic Siren Noise on Video Calls with Krisp

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Ambulance screaming down street

I’ve been using Krisp for the last two months to reduce background noise on conference calls and it has drastically improved my work-from-home experience. For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been working remotely full time. Remote work, for me at least, truly is the best way to be productive both personally and professionally. I believe it can work well for vast swaths of the workforce...

The Cost of Ignoring the Rails Way

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One of my consulting clients recently asked me to investigate a bug causing an unhandled exception in their production Rails app. The Bugsnag issue looked like countless others any Rubyist has no doubt reviewed before: undefined method `invitation_accepted_at' for nil:NilClass. This type of error indicates the code was expecting an object to have been returned when it wasn’t. A method was being...

GDPR Episode 2: A New Privacy Policy

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Headquarters of the EU, home of the GDRP

What does it take to write a GDPR compliant privacy policy? It was easier than we realized! This is a continuation of our series on ensuring StatusGator complies with the terms of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. To read the other parts of the series: GDPR Compliance Step 1: Data Erasure and Portability The GDPR has very specific requirements for privacy policies. ...

What is the cost of downtime?

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Datacenter image illustrating the cost of downtime

Experiencing app, website, or server downtime can be one of the worst situations any tech business can find themselves in. Having your applications fail or crash out of nowhere can lead to some serious consequences, both directly and in the future for your bottom line and business operations. For one’s customers, the situation is worse. Imagine not being able to access a critical...

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