Last week was a huge shipping week for us at Unscramble.
Not only did we ship tons of code with wonderful features, but also shipped our summer intern back to the USA (sad face).
Here’s a roundup of what we’ve been up to lately, and where we’re at now.
Good news first
We are now creating accounts for some select users on our mailing list. If you signed up for Jidoteki Early Access, you should receive an invite sometime this week as we slowly rollout new accounts.
Feature: Mandatory two-factor authentication
These days, information security is more important than ever, and we strongly believe it’s time for everyone to implement two-factor authentication. When you create your account on Jidoteki, you will need to perform an extra setup to enroll with a two-factor authentication code, and provide it on subsequent logins.
Feature: Minimum password length
It has been proven that longer passwords are better than shorter/complex ones, therefore we’ve increased the minimum password length to 12 characters while decreasing the complexity requirement.
Security at the expense of usability, comes at the expense of security.
- AviD @ StackExchange
Feature: Client-side random password generation
We provide some default installation scripts for each operating system when installing a virtual appliance with Jidoteki. Previously, the same default password was used for everyone (unless you changed it manually).
Now we use some great JavaScript magic to generate a new random password client-side, and add it to your installation script for increased security. We do this for every installation, and each time you hit the “Reset” button.
Feature: Downloading provisioned appliances
I know this sounds crazy, but can you believe we used to manually package and send links to download a provisioned virtual appliance? Well not anymore! You now have a lovely “Download” button which will generate and package your virtual appliance automatically in OVA format (VMware, VirtualBox).
If it’s your first time downloading the virtual appliance, you’ll receive an email notification once the packaging is complete and ready to be downloaded.
Feature: Syntax highlighting
The worst part of looking at an installation or bootstrap script was not having syntax highlighting. We’ve added this simple feature so you can better debug your scripts. Also, it’s pretty.
Feature: Site documentation
We documented most of the Jidoteki functionality. Have a look.
We think this is probably the most important feature of Jidoteki. Some people still have difficulty wrapping their head around what or how to do things in Jidoteki. We try to make the process as simple as possible, but now we have extra documentation to help if you’re confused.
Shipping appliances
We’ve also manually built and shipped a handful of virtual appliances for some of our customers, including commando.io and pullreview.com. Make sure you check out their awesome web services.
Our summer intern
As mentioned in a previous blog post, we hired a summer intern to help us work on Open Source Software. She did an AMAZING job and it was well worth the investment. We’ll provide more details in a future blog post.
The future of features
We’ve shipped hundreds of other little features, including features which improve other features, but we’re most excited about what’s coming up next. Stay tuned for more updates.