Adzerk Team Blog

Over the last few months, Adzerk has been searching for the best group chat client that could meet our needs. We were getting pretty serious with Jaconda, and then we spotted Hipchat in a coffee shop one afternoon. It has everything we need and more. We’ve fallen in love with it. Honestly, if it had a finger, we would totally buy a ring and propose. 

Why it Rocks

In early June, the development team made a decision to start continuous integration. Thanks to @jjeffers’ hard work, we now have a system in place that grabs our latest git commit and deploys it to our production server with no down time. It was important to us that we remained updated with the statuses of the builds. In Hipchat, we’ve setup Jenkins to hook into our development room. We’re now updated when it pulls the latest code, compiles it, deploys it to our QA server, runs our API and functional tests, and when it deploys to production. If something has failed, we’re notified immediately and we’re able to solve that issue right away.

Hipchat also has Github integration. When someone commits code, the team is notified. It’s a great way to keep the rest of the team updated on what you’re currently working on. Being able to have clickable links for individual commits is a really nice feature too.

Another neat feature is push notifications on iOS and Android. If I’m away from the computer, someone can direct message me and I’ll be notified immediately. Alternatively, someone can @ reply me in the public rooms, and I’ll be notified. The mobile application allows me to catch up on previous conversations, and I can collaborate with the team anywhere I am. Native mobile applications for iOS and Android are killer features. 

If I told you that Hipchat had secret rage emoticons, would you be psyched? At Adzerk, we’re big fans of rage comics on Reddit. Having the ability to use “Y U NO” and “F7U12” in group chat is one of my personal favorite features. When new customers signup through your referral link you can submit your own emoticons. Adzerk’s contributions to the Hipchat world are (kennypowers) and (zoidberg). You can find a partial list of emoticons here.

Competitors

There are a number of group chat solutions out there, but we found Hipchat to be superior on nearly every feature. Like I mentioned earlier, we used Jaconda for several months, but it didn’t fit our needs as we grew larger. IRC would have taken too long to manage, and it doesn’t support logging by default. Campfire was on the top of our list until we realized that we would have to pay more for native applications. A better comparison list can be found on Hipchat’s website.

Things we wish were better 

Honestly, there aren’t that many. Ideally, we would like to see a native Mac application. Currently, it’s just and Adobe Air client and a fully featured web application. I’m sure it made sense from a cross platform development perspective, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Additionally, there are connectivity issues that we seem to run into from time to time. Since Hipchat doesn’t allow simultaneous connections (desktop and mobile), there are times where the connection is lost. However, these are very minor issues that I’m sure will be addressed in the near future.

You can sign up with Hipchat using our referral link and we promise we will share the new emoticons. :-)