Published 1 jan. 2024
2023 - Year in review
As 2023 has come to an end, it's time to reflect on our first year as a startup. It's been a journey marked by both highs and lows, filled with invaluable lessons. Yet, before delving deeper, let's start with the basics.
Who are we?
brainhive is a software development agency in Zwolle specialized in delivering cutting-edge solutions tailored to your needs. We build cloud-native platforms, embedded software and manage the cloud infrastructure for our clients. Our focus is on delivering high-end, complex projects, particularly in areas where advanced technology and intricate problem-solving intersect.
What did we do?
Our journey began with 3 launching clients and we delivered a number of projects in 2023 (more on that later..). We set up our homebase in Zwolle (Noordzeelaan 50), welcoming two new team members!
Current state of our office
Key Statistics and Insights
At the time of writing, we manage 4 production clusters serving millions of requests each month without any major outages 1. Our cloud infrastructure (which we manage for our clients) is growing rapidly. On an average day we collect roughly 10GB of traces, 5GB of logs and 30K metrics.
At the end of 2023, we also began gathering various metrics for our frontends (user-facing web applications), including Time To First Byte, First Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. While we consistently receive feedback from our clients, these metrics provide a more accurate reflection of the actual user experience.
Open-Source
In the past year, we contributed to 8 open-source projects on Github with a total of 11 contributions (8 pull requests, 3 issues). We also published our first open-source Rust crate.
GitHub graph of @dmeijboom
Not all of our pull requests were merged. Acknowledging room for growth, we’re setting a goal to double our contributions next year.
What’s next?
In the past year, we focused on building a strong foundation, setting up our core infrastructure, and delivering the first couple of projects. This year will be focused on growth, whether that’s expanding our team or scaling our operations to take on more ambitious projects. We also want to spend more time into subjects like as A.I. 2, multi-cloud and sustainability.
Our vision is to create solutions that are not only cost-effective but also prioritize user privacy, setting new benchmarks for the industry. Though we’re not quite there yet, making this happen is our mission.
Footnotes
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Any incident where the website or application is completely inaccessible or suffers severe performance issues for more than 30 minutes, affecting a significant portion of users. ↩
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Rather than focusing on ChatGPT, our emphasis is on the development and utilization of self-hosted and open-source LLMs. ↩