Hello friends! Summer is historically the quietest time of the year, so the whole team took the opportunity to enjoy a few well-deserved weeks of holiday. I hope you have also found a way to rest and recharge.. another complicated year is ahead of us!
Company-wise, sales are still growing like crazy (+15% ARR this month only), which is awesome and at the same time kinda scary. I've had the pleasure of talking with Peldi from Balsamiq about this, and he mentioned the concept of company's natural size. The main idea is that it doesn't matter what you might have planned as founder or CEO, you don't get to decide the size of your company. It's the market who does.
Every company has a natural size, dictated by the problem it tries to solve. DatoCMS is now critically important to customers around the world. We're emerging as one of the leaders in our niche, and you can't do so with just 6 people. The market is asking us to grow, so we're hiring some new awesome people.
The first opening is for a Tech Customer Support representative: if you'd like to join our team and help us provide the best customer support around, please apply for this job!
Since the beginning of September the team is back to 100%, and we have already managed to get a lot of things done!
Here are the latest updates from our world:
GraphQL CDN is now faster than ever
This month we got off to a great start with a huge optimization to our GraphQL architecture. Thanks to these internal changes, we were able to improve the HIT ratio of our CDN cache moving from about 800k MISS per day to about 20k. Not bad, right?
The optimization affects the longest GraphQL queries and as a side-effect it also reduces the probability of encountering rate-limits. As of September 10th you are already enjoying these benefits... we hope you've noticed them!
A round of updates for Webhooks
Webhooks are a vital part of any successful, integrated project. We gathered up all the feature requests we received in the last months and delivered them to your door:
For "record update" events, the webhook payload now presents the record data both before the update operation and after, making diffs extremely easy on your end;
You can now pick the API version number defining the format of the payload that we are sending out;
You can also decide if you want the embedded blocks that might be part of a record to be expanded in the payload or not.
Nested blocks are coming next month!
Yep, the single most requested feature in the history of Dato is about to be released. Starting in October, you will finally be able to create multiple levels of blocks within your records, vastly increasing the possibilities for expression of your schema, without sacrificing 100% structured content.
We'll release all the details next month, but we thought you'd like to know that the moment is approaching!
Security improvements
In August we managed to work on several security improvements that had been in the backlog for some time. We commissioned a third-party audit to review all authentication flows, which as you can imagine are always extremely sensitive. A number of corrective actions were identified and promptly implemented, and we are now more secure than ever.
Agency Partner Program is starting to take shape
In the last newsletter we launched a public call for feedback, to help us identify what your ideal Agency partnership program would be. Well, the call is already open, but we already talked with many of you. Turns out every agency is kinda unique, but some recurring patterns are starting to emerge.
We'll soon tell you more about our findings, but in the meantime, please have a 10-minute chat with us if you're interested and want to help us!
Improve your website SEO with DatoCMS
HeadlessCreator has just launched a new lesson covering how to manage and improve your SEO. You'll learn how Dato's SEO fields work, how they can be extended and what data is returned by the GraphQL API. You'll finally see how to pull SEO content into a React app.
Wrap up
That's it for this update! If you have any questions about DatoCMS, want more detailed insight into our platform or a demo, do not hesitate contact us via community or support!