Devso Blog
Latest news and developments from Devso, including progress updates on the development of Test Track (https://test-track.com), Docuarmoury (https://docuarmoury.com) and future projects
Changing development stack for Test Track - Why and What to Expect
Test Track currently consists of two projects: a frontend project using the Vite ReactJS framework and a backend project using the Laravel PHP Framework. I've recently started rewriting Test Track with a new technology stack for several reasons. The rewrite uses the NextJS framework—a full-stack solution that combines frontend and backend code in a single project using one language. Since Test...
Chris Board
Nov 27, 2024 • 4 min readDocuamoury is now Live - What is it, Why I built it and what problems occurred along the way
If you’ve been following Twitter account you would have seen that I’ve building a new project for the last few months called Docuarmoury. Its taken a bit longer than I expected, but its finally available. If you don’t know what it is, then read on as I’m going to go into what Docuarmoury is, why I built it, and what problems I faced during the development. What is Docuarmoury? Docuarmoury...
Chris Board
Nov 05, 2024 • 7 min readMigrating from Datadog to Zabbix - Including Custom Metric Submission
For a few years, I’ve been monitoring 3 Digital Ocean servers using Datadog, and using DatadogStatsD to submit custom metrics to Datadog. I am a big a fan of Datadog and will continue recommending them, however for my needs, it became a bit too expensive for me so I started looking for alternative options. I decided to go down the self hosted route as that was the cheapest option. I decided to...
Chris Board
Aug 13, 2024 • 4 min readSubscription changes and new functionality for Test Track
On Friday 31st May at 21:00 UTC we will be performing an update to Test Track. With this update brings some changes to our subscription plans, one of which has been asked a while ago but its finally here, and also includes some additional functionality to Test Track itself. Subscription Changes First of all is an important change to our subscription offerings. We are removing the free plan...
Chris Board
May 27, 2024 • 3 min read
New Test Track Release
Towards the end of last year I did a blog post detailing how a new major release was coming...
Chris Board
Mar 22, 2024 • 3 min readMajor upgrade and new features coming soon to Test Track
I’ve unfortunately been a bit quiet on the blog posts in recent months but there has been several updates throughout the year. These updates have been relatively minor with bug fixes and some quality of life changes such as improving the user interface and adding access to certain areas in other places, such as the comments badge on a test step instead of having to open the test step and then...
Chris Board
Dec 13, 2023 • 6 min readRecent Updates and New Payment Provider for Test Track
Over the last few weeks I’ve released a couple of new versions of Test Track so wanted to provide some info on a blog post and what’s expected in the next release. A lot of these releases have been bug fixes or UI improvements however, there are some new features added along the way. One of the UI improvements made was around comments on a test run step. From the list of steps, there is now a...
Chris Board
May 28, 2023 • 2 min readWhy Test Track Release Is Taking So Long…Personal Update
If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you might have seen the odd update about Test Track and having a release available in the not too distant future, but unfortunately the update has been released as yet, and its a while off unfortunately, and I wanted to give an update as to why. I’ve unfortunately had a really annoying cough, not a particularly major health concern (at least hopefully not)...
Chris Board
Jan 17, 2023 • 2 min readMe and Devso in 2022
It doesn’t seem that long ago, but its that time of year where its time to write a blog post detailing how its gone for myself and Devso in 2022 and what you can export, or at least what I hope will happen in 2023. Devso Blog While looking at this blog to remind myself what happened this year I realised I haven’t been writing as many posts as I should have done. That’s something I want to...
Chris Board
Jan 07, 2023 • 10 min read
Test Track Available Now
I’ve been working on a project for the last month or two around test tracking for development and testing teams. One of the biggest parts of development, whether software,...
Chris Board
Oct 07, 2022 • 3 min read
Fixing Issue with NextJS and Prisma Date Types
I recently started working on NextJS (second attempt, I tried it once before but didn't like it - I did a post on...
Chris Board
Aug 17, 2022 • 4 min read
Major Redesign to Crash Catch Now Now Available
I personally use Crash Catch for my own projects to identify issues in other products and services that I create and in doing so I found some issues, some of which are bugs,...
Chris Board
Aug 07, 2022 • 6 min readRecent Issues with Crash Catch (Registration and Flutter)
I recently identified some issues with Crash Catch and want to let you know how it was identified and what I’m doing to ensure they don’t happen again. How Were Issues Identified As you may be aware, Crash Catch, is still relatively new and is currently running in a beta, therefore, issues are to be expected, however, the issues that I recently discovered should not have been there...
Chris Board
Jul 21, 2022 • 7 min read
Improvements to Support Portal
Providing support to customers and users is one of the most, if not the most important aspect for something to be a success. Providing support has the potential to make or...
Chris Board
Mar 09, 2022 • 6 min read
Improved Dashboard and Pro+ Plan Subscription for Crash Catch
I’ve been hard at work fixing bugs, making performance improvements, fixing screen layouts and improving the design over the last couple of weeks, but also adding support for...
Chris Board
Jan 07, 2022 • 3 min read
Boardies IT Solutions Becoming Devso in 2022
I've had Boardies IT Solutions (https://boardiesitsolutions.com) since the beginning of 2010. I got this when I was at University and used...
Chris Board
Dec 09, 2021 • 3 min read
New Crash Catch Libraries and Remaining Backward Compatibility
I recently did a post about an upcoming migration for Crash Catch where its backend rewrite is complete and getting released along with some website improvements. More...
Chris Board
Dec 02, 2021 • 5 min read
Crash Catch Backend Rewrite Release
A while ago I did a blog post detailing the future plans of Crash Catch which included doing a backend rewrite. You can find more information on that particular topic by see...
Chris Board
Dec 01, 2021 • 4 min readRemoving iOS Support from Crash Catch
Introduction Crash Catch is supposed to be a crash monitoring service for every developer and every platform, however with the development of the iOS library for iPhone and iPad developers this is proving to be a slightly different story. Current Implementation The current implementation is already somewhat limited in the sense that the library can't send...
Chris Board
Oct 14, 2021 • 5 min readCrash Catch Got Its First Sale - Almost ?
Crash Catch was released in March and have been I've been waiting for the day to get my first user. In case you are not aware, Crash Catch is our new crash monitoring solution for every developer, every platform and every programming language. I almost got my first user a couple of months ago when someone signed up but didn't continue,...
Chris Board
Sep 15, 2021 • 4 min readThe Future of Crash Catch - Converting the API to Laravel
Introduction For those of you who may not know, over this past year I have been building Crash Catch for my fellow indie hackers, hobbyist developers and startups to help them monitor and catch bugs and errors within their apps, software and Web APIs. Currently the API for the Crash Catch website (that's both the landing page at...
Chris Board
Jul 11, 2021 • 4 min read
Implementing Credentials Provider on NextJS and NextAuth (Registration and Login)
**NOTE: This blog post was updated on 14th April 2022 to include an example or registering new users and basing the instructions on the latest version of the NextAuth library...
Chris Board
Apr 26, 2021 • 23 min read
Month Update of Crash Catch ?
Well, to be more precise, nearly two months but it was supposed to be after a month it was a bit later than I had intended. Anyway, here is the update on Crash Catch, and...
Chris Board
Mar 15, 2021 • 3 min read
Crash Catch iOS Library - Unhandled Exception Handling - or not! ???♂️
If you've been following me on Twitter or the live streams on Twitch then you may be aware that I've been...
Chris Board
Mar 07, 2021 • 7 min readControlling Spotify on Home PC from Remote Desktop Session
Like a lot of people over the past year, I'm working from home. Therefore my entire day revolves around me at home on my personal computer, connected to the Office VPN and remote desktop to my office PC in order to do my day job. This is fine, except for one annoying issue, if I'm listening to music its on Spotify running on my home PC - it is possible to return audio from remote desktop...
Chris Board
Feb 19, 2021 • 3 min readUsing an iPad coming from Android
Anyone who knows me will know that I've never been a fan with apple. Not because I felt their devices weren't any good and I've heard good thing about Apple support and lifetime of device and how long it is supported. The issue I had was more of what Apple did in terms of their marketing, and quite a big reason, were Apple products are fairly expensive. One of things that I didn't like about...
Chris Board
Dec 05, 2020 • 12 min readRecent Updates on Crash Catch - Where Have I Been?
First of all, I want to apologise for the lack of content. I promised to do the development of Crash Catch as a live stream on twitch, which is still the plan to do, except I haven't done anything for the last few weeks, maybe even longer. Unfortunately my full time job has been incredibly hectic over the last few months with lots of late nights or just incredibily busy during the day, which has...
Chris Board
Nov 17, 2020 • 4 min read
Fixing Audio for Live Streaming without Special Hardware
A few months ago, I recently started live streaming development of a side project I am working on called Crash Catch, for more information on this project you can check out...
Chris Board
Oct 17, 2020 • 10 min readAndroid Crash Data Almost Complete
Its unfortunately been a while since I've been able to provide an update on the development of Crash Catch, but finally I can provide a bit of an update. So where have I been? Unfortunately my full time job was a tad on the hectic side the past couple of months so haven't been able to do huge development periods of Crash Catch, at least not long enough or interesting enough to warrant live...
Chris Board
Aug 03, 2020 • 3 min read
Info Take for Datadog - End of Life Announcement
You may be aware that some time ago, we developed Info Take for Datadog. This was an Android...
Chris Board
Jun 03, 2021 • 9 min readMy First Stream = A Disaster - Here's what happened
Earlier this year I did a post where I had the idea of streaming on Twitch the development of my new crash monitoring solution called Crash Catch. On the 1st May, I did just that, did my first live stream and progressed on the development of Crash Catch, it however did not go as planned. When I started the stream, I had a "Stream Starting...
Chris Board
May 25, 2020 • 3 min readGetting Started Developing Crash Catch
We're going to be doing, hopefully, regular blog posts regarding the development of Crash Catch, our new crash and error monitoring service. Now, if you've been here before, you might be thinking didn't you recently shutdown a crash monitoring service, and you'd be right, it was called CritiMon. CritiMon was originally built just for myself to fix certain issues I had with existing platforms. I...
Chris Board
May 12, 2020 • 4 min readLearning ReactJS
A while ago I posted about how we built a new website and Status Manager, the latter of which I learnt and built using ReactJS. This blog post is going to go through some of the things I had issues with learning ReactJS (not that many, its fairly straight...
Chris Board
Apr 20, 2020 • 9 min readNew Website, New Service Status & New Branding
If you've checked out our Facebook, Twitter or our website you may have noticied things are a little different. We've completely redesigned our website and branding and taken the time to learn something new by rebuilding from scratch our [Service...
Chris Board
Apr 07, 2020 • 3 min readCritiMon is Shutting Down...For Now!!
It is with regret I have taken the difficult decision to close down CritiMon for the foreseeable future with immediate affect. Unfortunately CritiMon hasn't been the success I'd been hoping for. I really thought that there was demand for a simplisting, affordable any stack crash monitoring platform. I still believe this to be the case but maybe I'm wrong or maybe I've gone...
Chris Board
Jan 25, 2020 • 4 min read
Boardies IT Solutions during 2019
Its the time of year again where we reflect on the past year and give a little insight in to what's to come during the next year. This year has been mostly focussed towards...
Chris Board
Dec 24, 2019 • 3 min readBig Release for CritiMon Now Available
Over the past few weeks we've been working hard on making a new release of CritiMon which we're excited to announce is now available. For this new release, we're providing a couple of special coupon codes to give you an extra 50% for the first 3 months, that means you can get the small plan for a little over £2.49 for the first 3 months, then go to £4.99, which is still 50% off the full price...
Chris Board
Nov 03, 2019 • 4 min readApple iOS Support for CritiMon
This is a little update about the progress of CritiMon for our next release, specifically regarding our official Apple iOS (iPhone and iPad) library. Unfortunately this post is a bit of a bad news post, at least bad news for now. Last week (Saturday 5th) I retweeted a Twitter post from my personal account from the Boardies IT Solutions Twitter account as shown below. This might be a small...
Chris Board
Oct 11, 2019 • 6 min read
New CritiMon Version Coming Soon
Over the past few weeks we've been hard at work making some changes based on feedback we've had for CritiMon - our new crash and error reporting service. This blog post will...
Chris Board
Sep 20, 2019 • 4 min readNew CritiMon Release & Competition
We launched a brand new version of CritiMon with new features and additional SDK/libraries to be included in your projects to receive crash and error reports and we have still have 50% off any paid plans but we also have a competition where you can either get a plan for free for 3 months or a another plan for a further 50% for 3 months. What's New? We have...
Chris Board
Aug 17, 2019 • 4 min read
CritiMon Getting Relaunched
Back in May we launched a new crash monitoring platform primarily aimed at solo developers, hobbyists and startups, ensuring you can get all of the...
Chris Board
Aug 06, 2019 • 6 min read
CritiMon - Crash and Error Reporting for Every Developer
We've launched a brand new crash and error reporting service available at https://critimon.boardiesitsolutions.com that works with any platform and programming language and...
Chris Board
May 23, 2019 • 9 min readRecent and unfortunately still outstanding certificate issue
As you might be aware, on the 17th January we had an issue where our site went offline due to a browser error stating that there was a certificate issue due to the certificate being revoked. We use a cloud VPS provider for our servers and load balancer. These servers have their own SSL ceritifcate installed for HTTPS access. We also use a service provider called Cloudflare which hides our site...
Chris Board
Jan 30, 2019 • 5 min read
CritiMon - Advanced Crash Management (Part 4)
This is the fourth post regarding our new crash monitoring platform "CritiMon", coming as an early access previous in Q1 of 2019. In the last post we explored registering...
Chris Board
Jan 27, 2019 • 5 min read
CritiMon - Viewing Crash Details (Part 3)
This is the third post regarding our new Crash Monitoring platform "CritiMon", coming as an early access preview in Q1 of 2019. In the last post we explored registering your...
Chris Board
Jan 20, 2019 • 9 min readChanges to Boardies IT Solutions Support
Last year we introduced a new idea to our support portal to allow a community based support system. Over the past year, we've not really notice it get used too much - we're hoping it might just be that our services just work flawlessly and there's never an issue - although we know nothing can be perfect no matter how hard we try, and we felt that it might be that it could be putting users off as...
Chris Board
Nov 19, 2018 • 2 min readCritiMon - Registering Applications (Part 2)
This is the second post regarding our new Crash monitoring platform "CritiMon" coming as an early access preview in Q1 of 2019. In this post, we will be talking about registering new applications as well as what we believe to be a unique feature that other crash monitoring platforms don't provide. In the last post, we gave a quick overview of the purpose of the platform and how it will work. If...
Chris Board
Nov 11, 2018 • 3 min read
CritiMon - Critical Monitoring Coming Soon Q1 2019 (Part 1)
As you may be aware, we develop various app and services for different platforms and languages. The main platforms being Windows and/or Linuux, Android and web services, with...
Chris Board
Nov 03, 2018 • 4 min readMySQL Database Vs Redis
Recently we've been hearing a lot about Redis, I don't believe its anything that's new, at least not in the tech world, but we've recently been noticing it a bit more so have been looking into it for some time, but never found a particular use case for it, at least not in the current services we provide. However, a recent project has made me think, hmm, I wonder if Redis would be better suited...
Chris Board
Sep 29, 2018 • 10 min read
Android MySQL Connector Library
We are execited to announce we have developed a new MySQL connector library to allow you to connect directly to your MySQL databases directly if required from your Android...
Chris Board
Jun 03, 2018 • 6 min readUpdate to our Privacy Policy
As you may be aware (probably by a huge number of emails arriving in your inbox with a privacy policy update) a new data protection law is coming into force on May 25th 2018 called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This ensures that companies keep you informed as to what is being collected and how they are using and storing your data. With that in mind, we have now updated our...
Chris Board
May 04, 2018 • 2 min readLook Back Over Boardies IT Solutions During 2017
Now that we are in 2018, we thought now would be a good time to look back at what Boardies IT Solutions has been working on over the course of 2017 and what the future holds for 2018. In February 2017 we updated our SSH tunnel plugin for Boardies MySQL Manager for Android from a C# application to a C++...
Chris Board
Jan 04, 2018 • 8 min readNew Release of Boardies IT Solutions Support Portal
Today we have released a new version of our support portal with speed improvements and new functionality. The main change is that it will no longer go straight to the support dashboard, instead of it will go to a landing page where it will describe each area of the support portal, e.g. Feature Requests, Issues, Support Tickets. It also shows the most popular/most recent knowledge base articles...
Chris Board
Dec 17, 2017 • 3 min readIntermittent Connectivity Issues to Boardies IT Solutions - How We Diagnosed and Resolved
Introduction You may be aware, and you may have noticed the issue yourself, that we opened an incident status on our Status Pages at the beginning of Octoboer describing a potential intermittent connection issue. We said potential, because at the time we didn't know if it was true, or whether we were just getting a false positives (we'll get...
Chris Board
Dec 18, 2017 • 24 min readBoardies MySQL Manager for Android Release 2.6.1.0
Today we are pleased to announce the release of Boardies MySQL Manager for Android 2.6.1.0. This release mostly focuses on improving the reliability and ease of use, however, there is one new feature included in this release, but will keep that til the end :). One of the things we've improved is the start up time when the app was launched. We found that this was due to our change log as it had...
Chris Board
Sep 28, 2017 • 5 min readAnnouncing Android Message Bar Library
Message Bar Preview Today, we're pleased to announce we have released a new Android Library called Android Message Bar. This provides a simple and lightweight library to allow you to create a message bar notification at the bottom of the screen, similar to what you might see on some Google apps such as Gmail. It supports...
Chris Board
Aug 20, 2017 • 1 min readInstalling Ghost 1.0 on CentOS 7 with Apache
Introduction Recently, Ghost announced version 1.0 of their publishing platform. We've been using the earlier releases for some time at Boardies IT Solutions for our blog and we've been really happy with it, and this continues with Ghost 1.0. Officially Ghost 1.0 only supports Ubuntu 16.04 with NGINX, however, our servers run CentOS 7 with Apache, but...
Chris Board
Aug 05, 2017 • 6 min readSSH Tunnelling Functionality for Boardies MySQL Manager Postmortem
On Saturday 22nd July at around 21:45 BST we noticed that Boardies MySQL Manager for Android was failing to do SSH tunnelling stating that the SSH Tunnelling was not available at that time and to try again later. Upon investigation we discovered that the service had stopped on both of our servers hence why it was a complete failure for the SSH tunnel functionality instead of it being a partial...
Chris Board
Jul 22, 2017 • 2 min readOpen Sourcing of PHP API and SSH Tunnel Plugin for Boardies MySQL Manager for Android
Introduction We are pleased to announce the open sourcing of our PHP API and SSH Tunnel Plugin for Boardies MySQL Manager for Android. This has been a long time coming but we finally did it and we can't wait to see what happens next. Why Now? This is something we've thought about for a while, it made sense to us to do open source it, one from a security point of view,...
Chris Board
Jul 03, 2017 • 3 min readImported Issues Migrated to the Relevant Area Of New Support Portal
A few weeks ago, we released our new support portal. We mentioned that we imported the bugs from our existing bug tracking service into our new support portals issue tracker. We have just released a new version to allow us to do this, you will now find that any issues that were better suited as a support ticket or a feature request they have now been moved. Assuming you provided us with an...
Chris Board
Jun 23, 2017 • 1 min readNew Support Portal Now Available
Introduction# Today (4th June 2017) we are pleased to announce the release of our new support portal service. We hope that this new service will make it much easier for you to get help, request new features, or report any issues with our apps or services. Issue Tracking Why We Developed the Support...
Chris Board
Jun 04, 2017 • 5 min readServer Outage - Friday 17th March
On Friday 17th March we had a server outage which lasted around 40 minutes. We strive to offer the best service we possibly can and ensure that our apps and services work at all times. We were particularly unhappy that this is the second outage to have happened within the last two months. On Friday 17th March we started receiving alerts from our monitoring system that the web server was no...
Chris Board
Mar 21, 2017 • 3 min readBoardies IT Solutions Support Website
We strive to do the best support for our apps and services, and therefore we want to make it as simple as possible for you to get in touch with us, whether you have found a bug in one of our apps or services, or whether you just need some help in how to do something. We currently have several ways for you to get in touch with us, these include the following: By Phone (+44(0)2393 162487) ...
Chris Board
Feb 26, 2017 • 3 min readBoardies MySQL Manager for Android News
Hopefully you know about our simple but useful light weight Android app that lets you view and edit your MySQL Databases on the move. Hopefully, if you do, you also know that the app supports connecting to your MySQL Database via an SSH tunnel instead of connecting directly to the database. Now unless you've read our website and documentation you might not necessarily know how the SSH...
Chris Board
Feb 22, 2017 • 6 min readBoardies IT Solutions During 2016
Well, its that time of year again, where we say goodbye to one year and welcome the new, and look back as to what we've done during the past year. You might be thinking, we haven't done that much this year, and although we haven't really made any new announcements, we have been hard at work. Service Status#### In the early part of 2016, we released a status page at...
Chris Board
Jan 01, 2017 • 5 min read*IMPORTANT* End of Support for Boardies Password Manager for Android
It is with sad news that we are officially ending support of Boardies Password Manager for Android. We originally released the app this app in 2011 and kept it updated for many years, and we had positive feedback for our users and had a fairly good rating on the Play Store. As you are probably aware, Boardies IT Solutions is just 1 person and unfortunately we haven't had the time to provide any...
Chris Board
Jul 05, 2016 • 3 min readBoardies MySQL Manager for Android Survey
We have a very short survey we would love you to complete. Our aim is always to listen to our users and make our apps better and better. For your time, at the end of the survey, you will have the option to provide us your email address and we will reply back to you with your promotion code that you can apply within the app and get all the current and new features that are added to the app. We...
Chris Board
Feb 20, 2016 • 1 min readBoardies MySQL Manager Competition
We have some exciting news. We're doing our first competition, no questions to answer, all you need to do is follow @BoardITSolutions Twitter account and email us your name, and Twitter handle and we will send you a promo code. Boardies MySQL Manager is an Android app that allows you to manage your MySQL Database, who'd have guessed that. The free app lets you perform select queries on the...
Chris Board
Jan 28, 2016 • 2 min readBoardies MySQL 2.0.1.0 Update
Introduction We have released a new version of Boardies MySQL Manager for Android and a new version of the PHP API. App Update After the past couple of months we have done some major code refactoring to the app. We have since issues and had reports of various quirky bugs where sometimes, if an SQL command failed or the API had an error, the app wouldn't show the error,...
Chris Board
Jan 27, 2016 • 3 min readRecent API Issues with Boardies MySQL Manager for Android
Introduction You may have experienced issues recently with Boardies MySQL Manager for Android returning an unexpected error message (screenshot below) when trying to connect to a DB or performing a query between the 27th-31st December 2015. Example of error This document outlines some of the issues that were...
Chris Board
Jan 02, 2016 • 3 min readNew Bug Reporting Service
Introduction We try and make apps the best that they can be, easy to use and functional, and no matter how hard we try and ensure there are no bugs, there are always some that somehow manage to slip through. Therefore we have a bug reporting service that allows our users to report bugs that they find. You can find the service at...
Chris Board
Oct 04, 2015 • 3 min readNew and Improved Boardies Password for Android
Introduction Boardies Password Manager for Android was released to the play store a few years ago, it was Boardies IT Solutions first Android app released, and although it has had several updates over the years, it has been unfortunately been left for quite some time. That being said, we have had some very positive feedback and it currently has an average rating of 4.5 out of...
Chris Board
Jul 18, 2015 • 2 min readThe Future of Boardies MySQL Manager for Android
Introduction Over a year ago we released Boardies MySQL Manager for Android. It was released as a Beta app, and it is still considered a Beta. For those of you are don't know, a beta app is an app, which is released to the general public, however, is still in active development, and is considered as an early release. This means that there will be bugs and features missing, and we...
Chris Board
Mar 28, 2015 • 6 min readWelcome to our new Blog
Introduction Here at Boardies IT Solutions, we have lots of things going on in the background to try and provide you a better service, and one way to do this is to keep in touch with our followers and our users of our software and services. From this blog, you will be able find out the latest news and information from Boardies IT Solutions, with some sneaky peaks as to what we're...
Chris Board
Jan 20, 2015 • 3 min read