Tag Archives: vaultpress

Code Garage Migration to VaultPress

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Today VaultPress announced the Code Garage migration details. We really wanted to make sure that we had the details and options on this right. I know that migrations like this can often be annoying, so we went out of our way to make the process smooth and inviting.

Code Garage users that migrate to VaultPress will get their first two months on VaultPress free. For those who don’t want to migrate, we’ll refund your last payment.

Even if you aren’t a Code Garage customer, you should go read Peter’s CodeGarage Locker is Migrating to VaultPress post. He gives a personal history of how Code Garage came to be, how it grew, and how it ultimately was sold to Automattic.

A New, New Focus: VaultPress

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Two years ago I posted about “A New Focus“, where my time at Automattic adjusted to be centered on Akismet. Back then Akismet was catching 500,000,000 spam comments per month (see the sidebar chart at http://akismet.com/about/). Today it is catching just over 2,000,000,000 spam comments per month (with a peak of nearly 2,500,000,000 at the end of 2011). Even with all that growth Akismet has continued to perform well, maintaining a high level of accuracy and performance, something that has been great to be a small part of.

This summer I’ve been asked to shift my focus again, by joining the VaultPress team.

If you aren’t familiar with VaultPress here is the elevator pitch: “VaultPress syncs the data from your WordPress site (posts, pages, comments, plugin & theme files, and media uploads) as they are added. On top of that VaultPress will scan your files for code vulnerabilities and changes to core WordPress files.” (more details are on the Get to know VaultPress page)

VaultPress also provides a restore process. If your WordPress site gets vaporized for some reason doing a fresh install and activating the VaultPress plugin will allow VaultPress.com to push a backup snapshot back to your server. There is also an option to manually download a backup snapshot, if you just want to pull out something specific.

The last two years focused on Akismet have been great, and now it is exciting to be taking on the new challenge of helping VaultPress improve and grow.

The Joy of Deploy

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Last week I started spending time on the VaultPress team at Automattic. VaultPress was something I hadn’t worked on previously and had only loosely followed, so the code base was something I wasn’t familiar with.

With my relatively fresh eyes (as far as not having worked on VaultPress before) I spent the first day or so just making observational notes about the service. Developers often suffer from having an intimate knowledge of a system, which can make it hard to picture how a regular user (who isn’t familiar with all the ins and outs) views things. This was my chance to avoid that before diving into the code base.

The next day, after assembling my notes, I started diving into VaultPress. Support, bug tickets, documentation, feature requests, code, the whole thing. I picked one of the very minor items from my notes and found the piece of code that needed to be updated. After running a few tests to make sure the change worked as expected, I committed and deployed the new code.

There is something magical about deploying code on a system that just a day or two ago you had never touched before. The joy of watching that first deploy (even for something simple) go live really gets you over that first hurdle of becoming comfortable with a new project.