Keeping Evil at Bay.
Hello readers, it's been a while. My apologies; trying to sell and updates to our products has kept me very very busy. Today we hit a particular technical milestone. Today some-one or some script tried to do a SQL injection attack against one of our Sprout! hosted websites. I'm happy to report that we detected the exploit and made the malicious users computer implode (kidding). One of the first monitoring features we built into Sprout! "back-in-the-day"[1] was an exception catcher for reporting production errors to our dev team. I was pretty amused when One of my co-founders shot me an IM this evening asking "What's up with those errors". I was amused more then angry that our visitor had triggered the email(s). I thought that when you are well known enough that people try to break in, on some level you've arrived. Needless to say I looked into the error, and just as I was about to patch the plugin throwing the exception I realized hey, this is Rails and this is a popular plugin, I bet someone else has patched this. I quickly took a look at the tickets for the plugin in question and sure enough in late December someone had commited a patch for just our issue. A couple commands later and voilà patch deployed.
2007 was a great year; I started a company, moved to the Bay Area, and built some great products. Sprout! has blogging features built in now (your reading it right here)! 2008 looks like it is going to be even better than 2007 and I remain more excited than ever about ThriveSmart Sprout and our team! We've been hitting various sales channels recently[2] and even though people always tell you "Sales is Hard", that doesn't even come close to describing how difficult it is. At the same time it can be fun if you make it into a game. We have a counter that tracks how many emails each member of the team has sent out to prospects[3]. Watching the counter go up everyday is a real morale boost!
Anyway, thanks for checking in. I'm still kicking and this year I resolve to blog more. And next year I resolve to write my new year's post closer to Jan 1.
Notes:
- Three months ago is ages in the time of the Google.
- Yes even I am out there pitching. I even went door to door selling websites one day, but that's a story for another day...
- No I haven't rigged it so I'm always declared the winner. That wouldn't be ethical.