folk Log Book

September 2023

• Task processor To deal with long and complex multi step tasks that can be a bit heavy on the platform, we have decided to implement our own task processor. We can handle the load better and decided to not spread the business logic everywhere. We’re a bit more relaxed now.
• Live updates Complete revamp of our live updates (web sockets) implementation. More granularity, more security, more everything…
• Reverse ETL More use case for our reverse ETL. We send analytics this way from our data warehouse. It’s more simple this way and removes it from the application. Sweet.

August 2023

• Observation improvements We have more things to look at, Real User Monitoring and we are also working on improving our logs. Seeing is goooood. 👀
• Multiprocess We can now optimize our instances by easily start multiple processes in one container. Cost reduction and better usage of ressources is something we care for.
• Kanban improvements Amount aggregation to compute the sum of certain fields in column. Something of high importance for sales use-cases 🤑

July 2023

• Desktop app Finally, a desktop app that is an alternative to the web app. Built with vitejs.
• Filter by any field It’s now possible to filter by any field. Something enabled by our refactoring of our custom field architecture last May.
• Notification center Users are now notified in-app on certain events: reminders, assignments, etc… Teamwork is now more visible.

June 2023

• New sidemenu A major rework of our sidemenu, with now expand/collapse mechanism, reordering and even favorites!
• Automatic deletion of inactive workspaces For users that have created an account but don’t actively use it, we decided to delete it after some time. As a user, we appreciate product that removes our data so that it doesn’t stay indefinitely on their servers. Also it reduces the db size.
• Move duplicate infrastructure Simplify and reduce the cost of our duplicate detection algorithm by removing it from Airflow and dealing with duplicates in near real-time.

May 2023

• Magic fields. Ask AI to generate (virtually) whatever you want, based on the data you have stored in folk. E.g. create custom icebreakers for each contact, write emails, or whatever you might need.
• Automatic deletion of old accounts Nobody likes their data to be kept forever in a product if you don’t use it. We now delete it automatically after some weeks of inactivity.
• Refactor custom fields A major architectural refactor to allow the stack to stay clean, fast and nice to navigate.

April 2023

• Library of templates. Pick and template, customize, and set up your CRM in minutes, not days. We have templates for deal-flow CRM, partnerships management, lightweight ATS, lightweight CRM, and much more.
• Outlook full integration (incl. emails and calendar events) You can now sync your Outlook account to folk, in addition to Gmail.
• Mobile-friendly. You can consult your contacts & groups directly on mobile.
• Google security audit We are compliant!!!

March 2023

• Outlook contacts integration Now importing contacts for Outlook accounts. Next step is importing interactions. A big challenge as 50% of our users are on Outlook.
• New table A sped up more convenient and accessibility first table is now implemented. Easy navigation, copy-and-pasting and drag-and-pasting. Getting us closer to the way a spreadsheet works which simplifies our users’ workflows.

• fully migrated to pnpm Easier dependency management and no more switching between yarn and pnpm. What a relief!
• More logs and dashboards Added more logs and added some dashboards to help with monitoring and debugging
• Fix sources bugs Google added twice would create some weird behavior. Took a bit of time but it’s finally fixed

February 2023

• Authentication improvements A lot of improvements for our authentication. Most visible features? Replaceing code validation with a magic link, sessions management, user can change their account email. Just like you expect it.
• ACL Our ACL just got a good refurbishment that will allow a more granular approach on rights. This will unlock many things, like preventing anyone from flooding our hiring pipelines with comments like ‘We need this person!’, ‘Let’s hire him!’, ‘Why haven’t you hired him already?’, ‘Helloooooooooo?’
• Log an interaction Users can now manually add an interaction to a contact like: I’ve had a coffee with this guy. Coffee was terrible, the opposite of this meeting …

• Code generated mocks We now code generate our mocks in the front end. No more writing mocks manually that are not up to date with our API. Hurraaaaay !!
• Db logs We’re now completely up to date on our db engines. Side-effet? We get db logs and we have starting identifying improvements opportunities on our requests and indexes. Feels like we have gained the sens of sight OO.
• Combobox refactoring We refactored our comboboxes. They used to be really annoying but now they are nice and gentle. Just like when a teenager becomes an adult.

January 2023

• Attachments in comments You can now add a funny picture in a comment on a contact.
• Pricing improvements An overall better management of our payment flow with better trial periods so you can … try more! (But don’t forget to pay)
• Enrichment in folkX folkX also gets to enrich your contacts. It’s a strong member of our family and contributes well

• Rolling out pnpm Better monorepo management with pnpm. As always with this kind of tasks, it starts easy until it gets really tricky.
• Db upgrades Upgrading the versions of our dbs because more recent stable versions are available and we like being up to date.

December 2022

• Email attachments It’s great to be able to send emails within folk but is it really useful if you can’t add that cute little gif showing a hug between a dog and a goose
• Improve our duplicates detection system Why clean your data when we can do it for you?
• Sort by any fields - part 2 Allowing to sort your data by any field you want is a commodity feature. It is now possible to filter by ALL fields including the ones created by our users. Now completely finished.
• Improved CSV import Importing companies and their custom fields properly. Confirm the mapping and let the magic happen ✨

• Moving all our chrome extension builds to the ci Making sure everything is automatically built and traceable
• Monitoring improvement Automatically monitor all of our routes properly, see trends and raise alerts.

November 2022

• Contact enrichment via DropContact We have integrated DropContact to enrich contacts with emails, phone numbers, job titles and position gathered on the web with their stateless technology. Enrichment requests are made by our users and the data is automatically populated as soon as it is available.
• Sort by any fields Allowing to sort your data by any field you want is a commodity feature. It is now possible to filter by ALL fields including the ones created by our users.
• New search page This new search allows our users to see the whole of their data to smoothen the creation of contact lists where the magic happens in folk.
• Definition of active user It is of utmost importance to us that we clearly understand who our users are and what they need and want. It’s not an easy job in a PLG business and it starts with clearly defining what an active user is and identify them so we can bring them even more value.
• Mobile webapp What can we say about this one? It’s pretty obvious that it’s nearly for a business like ours not to be available on mobile.

• Strengthen security We have done a round of security improvements.
• Improve web sockets resiliency WebSockets can sometimes be capricious and terminate. We have improved their resiliency and they are now wiser than ever (and don’t disconnect).
• Improve architecture processes Making sure we are all on the same page about how we want how architecture and stack to grow is very important to folk. So we made sure to have a lightweight process that keeps everyone aligned. Async notes and a short sync meeting make sure everybody knows what they should know.

October 2022

• Templates library Starting with a new tool can be tricky: empty workspaces and writer’s block can happen pretty quickly. Applying templates gives you examples and a feel of the power of folk. Even better, the community is not far behind.
• Entri for DNS records Setting DNS records to authenticate emails and avoid behind identified as spammers is essential when you are doing marketing campaigns. But it’s such a hassle. Entri makes is easy to propagate DNS records so everything works smoothly.
• Automatic acquisition channel performance analysis Being a PLG product, we need to know what acquisition channels are working and which are not. We have automatized all this and get consolidated views. We feel like growth hackers and it feels good!
• Deploy first Kafka use case Kafka is here and we are using it in production now 🙌 It’s a big step forward as it will help us grow our architecture.

• Write runbooks We now have a complete documentation describing our domains and deployment units, how to deploy them and their dependencies. We also know what to do when they don’t work.
• Monitoring utils package Tooling to simplifying our monitoring. It feels good to easily see clearly.
• Start using AWS spot Because money is money.

September 2022

• Messages statistics Nothing is more frustrating that sending an email campaign have and no idea if it was successful. It’s now possible to track delivery and open rates. Ooooooh yeah!
• In-app payment Because money is money.
• Add a search on our Chrome extension So far you could only fetch the information of the opened LinkedIn profil. Now you can display in our Chrome extension any profil from your workspace.
• Onboarding AB test Quick AB test to see if it was worth it to remove an onboarding step. Guess what: it was not.
• Made public views responsive Because you open them from your mobile sometimes. A mobile phone is that thing always in your hand…

• Optimize DB sizes Performance is key. DB sizes is part of this game.
• SQS package Extract utils in a package to deal with SQS queues. Simpler, easier.
• Update to React 18 Oh boy! Thank you Antoine (T) for this one! One for the team 🙏

August 2022

• Share views publicly You can now share some of your folk data publicly. You share a link, people can see some nice tables with interesting information.
• Add contact strongest connections Wanna know which of your colleagues knows this cool guy best? Well we compute that for you. You can now ask for a recommandation or try to get closer to the cool guy (but don’t say anything).
• Refactoring: preparing the introduction of Kafka in our stack We see Kafka as an step forward in our architecture but one does not simply add Kafka in their stack. This was a major refactor; it clarified how we wanted to deal with data from now on.
• Data Warehouse We have our own datawarehouse! We have our own datawarehouse! Thanks Alex!!
• Optimized merge contact route from ~1.5sec to 300ms Because time is money.

• Set up VPN access in replacement of IP whitelisting No one likes to update an IP whitelist.
• Improved prioritization system of technical projects How do you prioritize getting rid of ternary operators against having braces inline with if? Now we know.
• Set up internal CI runners Sped up CI jobs and it’s also cheaper.