18 April 2019

Week 37: Automating our onboarding

Recap: Fluidkeys makes PGP simple for engineering teams. It helps you safeguard your source code and protect passwords, secrets and personal data.

The short version

We gave a demo to the BSI
We’ve been automating our onboarding
We made some funding and product plans

We gave a demo to the BSI

The Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (German Federal Office for Information Security) kindly invited us to demo Fluidkeys this week.

We dialled in via Zoom to their offices in Germany (an experiment for both of us!) and demonstrated 3 ways that Fluidkeys simplifies PGP for teams. There were some great questions afterwards and good feedback.

We’re grateful for their ongoing kindness and moral support!

We’ve been automating our onboarding

When people install Fluidkeys, there are certain things we’d like to see happen, for example enabling automatic key extending, sending a secret, creating a team.

If those things don’t happen, we’d like to gently point people in the right direction by email. This is also a great way of finding out if anything went wrong, or if the person has any questions.

Much of this week was laying the groundwork for automating sending these emails.

We made some funding and product plans

Just now we put together a list of potential funding organisations who might be able to help bridge our funding gap in August. I’ve learned a lot about who’s out there and some of the awesome projects they’ve funded. We’ve decided to do “funding mondays” where we spend half a day working on funding research and applications. If you know any organisations interested in any of these areas, we’d love to hear from you:

Reducing data breaches and the erosion of privacy
Improving the open source encryption ecosystem
Catalysing change across the technology industry by building tools that embed privacy by design
Fluidkeys for journalists: making strong encryption simple for journalists

We also planned the next few weeks on product: we’re going to add some telemetry to Fluidkeys so we know exactly what’s working and what’s not. We’ve found an issue in the way macOS mojave allows background access to the Keychain (for storing passwords) which affects Fluidkeys’ ability to run automatically. With telemetry we’ll be able to measure that and help people fix it before it becomes a problem.

Next week

Next week we’ll implement automatic expiry emails so anyone whose Fluidkeys’ is not running correctly in the background will get instructions to remedy the issue before it becomes a problem.

That’s it for now. Happy Easter!

— Paul

/All/ feedback is welcome, pop us an email to hello@fluidkeys.com