COVID-19 update from the Sanity team (ssr)

Written by Magnus Hillestad

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Dear Sanity community,

It is with sorrow we watch the COVID-19 pandemic accelerate throughout the world. Many of you are experiencing hardship directly from the disease or from secondary effects as social distancing goes into effect. Our hearts and thoughts are with all those affected.

The current situation and the coming months are uncharted territory for all individuals, companies and governments alike. Our immediate priority has been to get an overview, ensure the wellbeing of our team and make scenarios and plans for the time to come. And we take comfort in being in a strong position:

• We are all healthy and safe in our homes
• We have a robust and experienced team, and we have been through crises before
• We have an active community and great momentum. More people use Sanity every day
• We are well funded and have great backers with additional capital
• Our software and services are in high demand as enabling higher content velocity and more efficient collaboration is high on the agenda of smaller and larger business alike
• Developers are our core users, and many are used to working from home

We have also experienced some internal difficulties over the last few weeks. Due to consistent high and also accelerating usage growth, we, unfortunately, have had smaller periods of instability in our services. We have resolved most of the issues, and are currently executing a plan to make us even more reliable and better prepared for further growth. We are finally rolling out sharding of the backend services; a step-change in our long term scalability and stability.  We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this instability has caused you.

In times like these, it's important that we come together and support each other. Sanity is a company with deep Norwegian roots. In Norway, we have an expression called “dugnad”. Google claims it translates to “voluntary work”, but we don't feel this captures all of its meaning: It's a word embodying the spirit of our obligation to contribute, not with money, but with our own hands, skills, and time. We are all used to going to “dugnad” for the football team, the school, or for our community.

Over the last week, we have started to see people using Sanity to develop solutions for helping others through these difficult times. This is something we want to support. We are now giving every non-profit corona related initiative a free Sanity advanced plan, and we are prepared to carry the cost for good projects that scale beyond that plan on users and traffic. Please reach out to dugnad@sanity.io with your project ID and a simple description of your project and we will get you upgraded. There is also #dugnad on our community slack for those who want sparring on their initiatives.

We believe it is our obligation to continue our business as normal as possible, and stay focused on building an even stronger product, team, and community. We are continuing to hire great colleagues, and we are happy to announce that Alexander Staubo, a Norwegian based in New York, will be joining Sanity. Alexander is an experienced backend developer and is also one of the original developers of Sanity, and we are eager to get to work with him as part of our team again. We will carry on our work to strengthen and accelerate Sanity throughout the challenging times ahead.

Going forward our key priorities will be to:

1. Take care of our colleagues and our loved ones now working from home
2. Assure a stable service and further scaling of our service
3. Continue to give best in class support to our developer community and Enterprise customers
4. Double down on developing a great product and helpful materials that makes Sanity.io easier to use

Please do reach out to us through the community or otherwise if you want to discuss further

Warm regards,

Taran, Radhe, Holm, Alex, Nicholas, Ørjan, Marius, Jørn, Anders, Thomas, PK, Victoria, Bjørge, Rune, CF, Jacob, Espen, Pål, Knut, Øyvind, Simen, Even, and Magnus