Into The Forrst

Forrst App Contest

It’s been a long time getting to this point but the final stage of the Forrst App Contest is ready to begin. For those whom don’t know the Forrst App Contest was an event held at the beginning of the month for Forrst members to team up and create awesome web apps over a weeks time. Out of the contest we ended up with 5 complete apps from four different teams. The theme for our first app contest was “productivity” and these are some seriously cool entries.
 
Voting will work as follows. We have a small write up on each app over on Forrst and members are encouraged to checkout each one and for the app they like the most leave a reply with “forrstcontestvote +1”. At the end of voting we will add them all up and to the victor belong the spoils. Please only vote for one app(one man/lady one vote).
 
We are hard at work to fix the problems of the last contest and plan out the next one. We are very open and eager to hear ideas on themes and rules for the next contest. One thing I can tell you is that the next contest will be announced with a month notice and also with a complete contest site prior to launch.
 
Without further ado here are the final four entries. 

• Kippt http://forr.st/~y39
• eval http://forr.st/~y3D
• Formbakery http://forr.st/~y3Y
• Rekindle http://forr.st/~y3q 
• Ductmail http://forr.st/~y3L  

-Mike

Welcoming Mike.

Forrst has been growing by leaps and bounds since its relaunch at the beginning of May. We recently crossed the 10,000 user mark, more than doubled traffic in July, and the site is bustling with activity — users are more engaged than ever. I’m ecstatic to see developers and designers diving in and helping each other improve their craft. It’s a humbling feeling.

Now that the site is substantially more active than it was a few months ago, it’s getting a bit harder to keep up with support requests, moderation, community questions, and the like; I still try to answer everything, but it’s at the point where I can’t get to things nearly as quickly as I’d like (I’m not ignoring you, I promise!)

To that end, I’m very happy to welcome Mike Evans as the first official Forrst moderator. Anyone who spends more than a few minutes on the site will probably come across Mike. He’s been a big supporter of Forrst since the early days of the site, and I’m excited to be working with him; he’ll be helping me handle moderation of posts and comments, as well as pointing members in the right direction if they’ve got questions about the community.

So, welcome Mike!

Forrst Meetup, tonight 7/9 in NYC

I’ll keep this short: The details:

Pizza at Saluggi’s around 6pm tonight, July 7.

325 Church St. NYC (directions)

After, we’ll probably head to Nancy Whiskey Pub (1 Lispenard St; directions) for some beers.

If you’re in NYC tonight, you should come! Kyle, Adam, and Pasquale will be there in top form.

How we deploy new features on Forrst

A few people have asked recently about how rolling out new features is handled at Forrst. While the answer is nothing spectacular, it is something I think is hugely important to consider implementing when you’ve got a fairly active site. Flickr wrote about a few tricks they use — called feature flags and feature flippers — when building and deploying new features to the site. Flags dictate whether a specific piece of functionality is turned on or off, and flippers dictate for whom the feature is enabled or not. Forrst uses a very similar implementation (we call them buckets; you may hear others calling it that as well).

I’m currently working on a few new user-facing features for the site: being able to mark a post as a favorite to come back to later, and being able to like a comment. Both of these new features are already live on the site, but only enabled for certain users. Since Forrst gets a pretty fair amount of traffic and activity day to day, being able to gradually roll out new features (and to quickly disable them if need be) is of great benefit. Here’s an example of how it works on the site; within the template for a comment, there’s an additional logic branch:

<?php if (in_arrayi($this->current_user->username, Comment_Model::$bucket_like)): ?>
// some fancy magic here
<?php endif; ?>

The associated $bucket_like variable is simply an array of usernames for whom the feature should be enabled. (in_arrayi is a custom PHP function that behaves exactly like in_array except that it is case-insensitive.) There’s also a global config that allows me to quickly disable the comment like feature globally.

That’s basically the gist of feature flags/flippers. There are about five or six features currently enabled for a subset of users. I’m also working on migrating the underlying feature flag code to a more powerful library that supports not only username whitelists, but also stuff like enabling features for all users with an ID < 1000, and so forth.

Hopefully this sheds a little light into how we’re doing things at Forrst. It’s definitely nothing groundbreaking, but rolling out new stuff this way makes a ton of sense for us. It allows product to get to users faster, thereby getting us valuable feedback and bug reports sooner, and ultimately leading to a more solid product.