A personal note on the release of the new Zesty.io Content Manager experience from Stuart Runyan, VP of Engineering

It will be hard to put into words what the release means for me but let me try.

I can remember the lightning bolt moment in my web class when I had my first introduction to HTML & CSS. At that moment I knew I would be doing this for the rest of my life. 

While still in college I worked at a few startups and got my first taste of the industry. One of them was the most toxic, overworked environment I've ever experienced. If I learned anything, it was how to recognize problematic workplaces and what my limit was for burn out. After finishing school, I began my career working at a digital marketing agency. This is where I cut my teeth on web development. I loved it! I got to work with some fantastic people plus meet a long term good friend and mentor. After a few years the work was not challenging anymore. I started to get frustrated. Luckily, I had a great manager who recognized this and coached me on how to move forward in my career. It was time to get exposed to serious engineering.

My eyes were set on San Francisco. I began exploring job opportunities that fit my requirements of internet scale business, dedicated software engineering team and web based. Luckily I found the perfect role in my home town of San Diego at Tealium. I worked with a team of roughly 30 engineers. They dealt with requests in the billions. I worked on the front-end of a complex web app, AudienceStream. It was a great transition from a digital marketing business as I already understood the space by previously implementing Tag Management Systems. Working there was a great experience. I got to meet some truly amazing people, have some memorable experiences and be part of deep technical conversations. 

Out of the blue an old acquaintance from my digital marketing days contacted me. Andy Fleming was wondering if I knew anyone who would be interested in working with an early stage startup. Well, of course I was going to have the conversation- during which, he hooked me. The CMS, Zesty.io, that Randy Apuzzo and Andy had demonstrated to me a few years prior was kicking into high gear. Opportunity knocked when I had least expected it. To be honest, it was a difficult decision. I was perfectly happy at Tealium, had a fairly clear career path ahead of me and the job security felt good. Both were startups but one was very unproven while the other was entering late stage. 

Ultimately I couldn't avoid the temptation of being part of building something from the ground up and getting to build a larger scale product. Tealium already had lots of structure and hierarchy in place. It would have been difficult to have an influence on the technology. Plus, Zesty was building something near and dear to me, websites. Well a CMS, a tool which lets you build websites. 

When it comes to the web, I am an idealist. If you have met me you have probably heard this spiel before. The web is the greatest human innovation to date. The democratization of information has fundamentally changed our global society. We are connected in a way that simply was not conceivable before. It is altering us in ways I do not think we can predict. And we are just at the beginning. Along with this it is an amazing creative medium, which I feel still has not been fully explored. I love storytelling and the web in my mind is the greatest venue for telling one. I was being offered the opportunity to design and build something which would let people accomplish this. 

Yeah- I was excited to join Zesty.

Turns out, startups are not all rainbows and sunshine. They present tough challenges; technically, professionally and personally. At some point in his life I think Randy will write a book on it. Five years later, or as Randy recently said half a decade… wow, having gone through the natural ups and downs of a startup we are still working to accomplish our vision. A large part of the journey has been building a business that can survive. Which is a much different and just as difficult task of building a product which can survive. 

We are about to release the largest change to Zesty's user experience we have ever done. This is the culmination of what I wanted to be a part of over 8 years ago. Building something complex and at scale. Our customers send almost a billion requests a month to our platform. We have customers who continually push the boundaries of our applications and APIs. Challenging us to continually improve. One of the largest hurdles for us being able to meet these challenges has been our legacy user interface which the core of was built over a decade ago. 

The underpinnings of our interface is now fundamentally different from what we shipped to our customers over the life of the product. It has been modernized to separate our front-end from our back-end. We built the UI on a combination of open source technologies such as; ReactJS, ReduxJS, MonacoJS and many many more. Now with our stack separated we are very excited to make our front-end code base, which is the core CMS experience, public.

This change marks a milestone in our company's history. We are now at the start. Meaning we have finally hit a point where we no longer need to juggle competing priorities. Product choices made over a decade ago in the early days of a fledgling product no longer weigh us down. We can squarely focus on product stability and feature innovation. Leaving the future of Zesty in the clouds.

I would be remiss not to recognize and thank the individuals who contributed to us achieving this product milestone. Andy Fleming, one of Zesty's co-founders, was one of the largest contributors to the codebase over the years. Grant Gildewell was a core contributor to our content editor experience among other parts of the product. Joshua Hanson, one of the latest team members, really took this work over the finish line. Within weeks of starting with Zesty he was contributing large meaningful portions of this final experience. There have also been a couple of contractors over the years who have contributed large parts of the codebase; AJ Zane and Hector Sanchez. 

While the folks listed above contributed directly to the front-end codebase we would not have made it to this milestone without the complete Zesty team across back-end engineering, sales, accounts and support.

Looking forward to a decade, Randy.