👀 Do we have experimentalists here?

Announcements
,
1

As you know, our team is always working on new features, updates, and improvements. Community feedback plays a big role in these processes, and now we want to give back by inviting the biggest Baserow enthusiasts to check how all works behind the scenes :mag:

With the idea to leverage what we believe to be two of our greatest strengths — our outstanding community, and our development team, we came up with the Testers Guild.

What is it? This is a place where our users could get sneak peeks and early access to the upcoming Baserow features to play around and share feedback with us.

How will you access features? We will provide you with a link to a separate environment where all unreleased features will be available for you to try them out. You need to be aware that some of the risks are involved — something may be broken or work a bit incorrectly, so we don’t advise you to use important data for the trial sessions.

Important note! Please don’t consider this idea as a chance for us to have free testings made by our users, not at all. By testing, we mean that you will try out new features as you usually do, but before anyone else. Prior to giving you the early access, we will do all tests by ourselves as we do before any public release.

So, our question is — would you love to be the first to try new features in Baserow? Put your vote below to help us validate the idea of the program.

  • I would love to!
  • Sounds interesting, but I don’t think I have time for that!
  • I may join if you offer something back.
  • No, I prefer using already polished features.

0 voters

Thanks in advance, and maybe soon the Baserow Testers Guild will come alive :crossed_fingers:

2 Likes
3

Hi Olga, I’d like to know if this got off the ground? I have been thinking about how to ensure that new releases of Baserow don’t break existing apps, as I can see with a small dev team and limited time and resources, testing all impacts of changes before deployment would be a constant challenge. I would be very interesting in helping with testing under the follow conditions.
If I have the ability to clone my known working app/database from prod to your test instance (if this can reliably be done as a one click process) so that I can test out known functionality to pick up issues prior to deployment, instead of waiting for things to break in prod.
If you could do this, I would be 100% in, as this is a win win. It gives me a chance to spot issues early, and it provides another set of eye for you.
What do you think?

1 Like
4

Hi @DataGecko, due to limited interest, we never launched the initiative. Currently, we don’t have any similar programs running.

I will check with the team to see if we have any options to help with your request. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
5

That is great thanks. I think there might be more interest now to try again to get some testers on board. :slight_smile: Thank you.

6

Hey @DataGecko, do you self-host Baserow? If yes, you can enable the develop-latest branch and test new features before updating to a new version. Will it work for you?

7

Hi @olgatrykush I host with Baserow, so unfortunately that is not an option - though good to know. While I understand it is probably an infrastructure cost you guys would prefer to avoid, having a pre-deployment instance running the pre-release code, where devs could publish to similar to how we publish production apps now… that would be amazing. Not only for devs who can ensure their apps are going to break, but also for Baserow to have the community finding bugs pre-release, leading to significantly less impact to production apps with each release. Seems like a win-win if it is economically viable. Only needs to be a minimum spec instance as you won’t have that many pre-deployment testers, and looking at how you do deployments not, its seems most of the hard work is done for that.
Just an idea. :blush:

8

Unfortunately, this is currently the only way to access unreleased features. It’s how we test everything before releases. If you’d like to give it a try, I can share the link to the guides on how to self-host Baserow. Let me know. :slightly_smiling_face:

9

Ok, no prob. I’m guessing I might be able to self host locally, and export/import to then test locally? These days I tend to prefer the simplicity of someone else doing the hosting and sleep better. :sweat_smile:
Please do link the guides and I will have a look see. :pray:

10

Sure @DataGecko, this is the installation guide: Install with Docker. You need to run the develop-latest branch: https://hub.docker.com/r/baserow/baserow/tags

docker run \
  -d \
  --name baserow \
  -e BASEROW_PUBLIC_URL=[http://localhost](http://localhost/) \
  -v baserow_data:/baserow/data \
  -p 80:80 \
  -p 443:443 \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  baserow/baserow:develop-latest

In case you have any question, we are here to help :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like