Since Black Friday first became a thing, roughly 15 years ago, practically every big name in digital retail has experienced some form of outage while trying to cope with its demands. Last year alone, international retailers Lowe’s, Debenhams and Game all suffered downtime at one point or another, bringing howls of complaint and derision from customers.

We hope you’ve had a fantastic summer and are now enjoying the fall. After our release of Bugfender 2 earlier in the year, we’ve been fine tuning and adding many UI improvements. We’ve also been working on an improved filter view, enhancing issues and adding React Native support – all coming very soon, so watch this space.

When we think of other products in Bugfender’s space, we don’t really think of competitors; we think of alternatives. Because, being honest, Bugfender doesn’t really have any direct competitors. That sounds like cheesy marketing, right? Yep, we get that. And we don’t say it to be arrogant. We say it because Bugfender was built to provide a unique service in our space. In fact it’s designed to serve the specific needs of our parent company, Mobile Jazz.

Realistically speaking, how many times do you redownload an application that’s buggy? Unless it’s a hugely beneficial app, which one might begrudgingly use (off the top of my head, I can’t think of any that aren’t replaceable), users tend to just switch to an alternative app that does the same thing — sans bugs.

Solving a Rubik’s Cube. Skiing uphill. Completing Goldeneye on the N64 and looking suave when standing next to George Clooney. These are all things which are harder than marketing your product to developers. But, to be honest, we can’t think of too many more. We’ve tried everything to promote Bugfender to the development community. Being developers ourselves, we should have known how difficult this would be.

We are happy to announce that our latest version of the Tideways extension (v5.0.22) includes support for the Spryker E-Commerce Platform through fully automated instrumentation and hooks into the core of Spryker. With the complexity of a large E-Commerce project, different channels, multiple language stores and landingpages for campaigns it is especially difficult to get a full view of the performance and errors from within your software as a project manager, developer or system administrator.

With all the customers running Tideways on their Magento, Oxid or Shopware shops I was interested in how in the aggregated average, those shops usually perform on Black Friday compared to the 8 weeks before and the weeks after leading up to Christmas. A lot of e-commerce shops have either large Black Friday, Cyber Monday or week long christmas campaigns, which can increase the traffic to the shops significantly.

A few weeks into year five of the Tideways project we are happy to announce the release of Tideways version 5, including large updates to all parts of the stack from PHP extension, daemon and the user-interface. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Tideways no. 5!