The Honest Duck, Issue 2

March 2021

Hello, everyone! Thank you for subscribing to The Honest Duck newsletter. 🦆

Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve been doing:

  • We’re about to announce a new partnership and the upcoming release of a new, open-source plugin!
  • We’ve released two new videos on the multiple ways you can implement Kill Bill. We’ve also given our docs a new look and navigation.

 

On Plugins and Other Customizations

As you know, Kill Bill’s strength is in its extensibility via plugins. However, not everyone who contacts us about Kill Bill has the internal IT resources to develop their own plugins.

To meet these users’ needs, Kill Bill will soon “officially” announce a partnership with Wovenware, a software engineering firm nationally recognized for its software engineering and AI capabilities.

By designating Wovenware as the go-to vendor to configure, extend, and integrate Kill Bill with internal and third-party systems, Kill Bill users can shorten the inquiry process. Furthermore, by setting standardized development costs for plugin types, Wovenware has simplified the cost analysis portion of evaluating Kill Bill.

Wovenware has worked on many Kill Bill plugins and customization in the past. The future looks bright for those of you who need assistance to upgrade or enhance your Kill Bill needs! For more information, please check out Wovenware on the Kill Bill website.

A New Plugin!

As one of the first projects under the aforementioned partnership, Wovenware has developed an open-source plugin that enables Kill Bill users to use Braintree as their payment processor for credit/debit cards, ACH, PayPal, Venmo, and many other payment methods.

The plugin isn’t released yet, but it will be soon. We’ll announce it on Twitter and LinkedIn, so if you haven’t liked or followed us on either of these social media sites, please do!

Tip: Debug a Plugin

Plugin developers have been developing custom plugins using our plugin development document for a long time now. They often encounter errors that they are unable to debug, and thus end up spending a lot of time and effort figuring out the issue.

In such cases, it is useful to start Kill Bill in standalone mode and debug the code by setting up a breakpoint. Our plugin development document has been updated recently and explains how one can set a breakpoint and debug the plugin code.

Latest Kill Bill Release

The latest release of Kill Bill is 0.22.20 (GitHub release notes). Our last few releases have addressed bug fixes.

New Videos Available

One of our goals is to help newcomers to Kill Bill get up and running quickly. To that end, our instructional designer has created two new videos:

And here is our entire line-up of YouTube videos. We’d love it if you subscribed to the Kill Bill channel!

New Look and Navigation for Docs

The documentation side of Kill Bill received a makeover recently. (We’re still tweaking some things, like the new global search feature.)

We’re also planning on adding in additional navigation cues to help with moving around. We hope you like what we’ve done so far!

Team Member Spotlight

Reshma works on our technical documentation, and she recently created a tutorial for plugin development. Using GoCardless as a sample, she explains how to write a Kill Bill payment plugin. (GoCardless is a fintech company that helps businesses enable recurring payment processing via direct debit.) We’re grateful to have Reshma’s experience and skillset to improve our docs!

About Reshma: Reshma Bidikar is a Java trainer and a technical writer with over 12 years of experience as a software developer. She creates the full spectrum of technical documents—from blogs to wireframes. Her specialty is in documenting previously undocumented existing code. Reshma has a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Soa University.

Reshma Bidikar, Technical Support Engineer