SpectoLabs is growing

At SpectoLabs we are now well on our way on the startup journey; 2 years in and it’s time to take stock of what we have achieved and set the direction for the next 2 years.

The Hoverfly open source project is going from strength to strength with great community support and validation. Hoverfly has had some notable mentions like Alex Soto’s book Testing Java Microservices, and recent articles like the one from Daniel Bryant on medium.com. Demand at a recent Hoverfly workshop run by Daniel was again a reminder to me about the level of interest out there — all positive signs. I encourage you to take a look at Hoverfly project on GitHub and get involved.

There is growing interest in Hoverfly Cloud and a steady increase in subscribers although, quite naturally, we’d like to see more. There has been great feedback from users and customers. Some time ago we established a Customer Advisory Board for selected customers and this is proving to be very effective in helping to shape Hoverfly Cloud and provide a truly useful product. Lookout for the next series of releases as we continue actively responding to customer requests.

The organisation is evolving too and I have come in to move SpectoLabs into the next growth phase. We are looking at a few key focus areas like updates to the cloud product, expanding the development team, and an increased emphasis on sales and marketing. The marketing has been very interesting for me as a relative newbie to the space as Service Virtualization is in fact relatively new and there is a wide variety of opinions about what it is and what it includes. Hoverfly fits squarely in the API Simulation camp, designed to support modern development practices like DevOps and microservices with their fundamental reliance on REST services and APIs. I really like how Hoverfly provides simulated APIs in a way that is invisible to the calling app or service — this isolation makes it possible to easily swap between simulation(s) and the real service in a completely transparent way which is a real benefit to testing. And there are some great new community driven features coming out such as the ability to selectively simulate a response or pass it through to the real service. We thrive on feedback and suggestions and welcome your input.

And to finish with some good news — we’re hiring again. This time looking for a Senior Full Stack Developer to work in our London office. This is a great opportunity for a developer who is looking to work with leading technologies including (in no particular order) Go, Kubernetes, CNCF. As Hoverfly matures it is more important than ever to work with the feedback from our customers and provide the improvements that they are asking for. I’m seeing traction in a number of areas like CI/CD, load and performance testing, Cloud Native, microservices testing and development. In fact anywhere where it makes sense to have control over API dependencies (or backing services depending on the world you live in) Hoverfly makes it easier and faster to get the work done.

If you’re interested please check the job spec and if you are a good fit send a covering email and your resumé to cv@specto.io. (No recruiters at this time.)