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• New Hackaday.io Chat Engine

  Aleksandar Bradic • 03/14/2017 at 17:18 • 12 comments

  Over the next few days, we're planning on releasing a new version of the Hackaday.io chat engine.

  WHY?

  • Current chat engine has performance and scalability issues, especially with large rooms or users with a large number of conversations.
  • When we build this initially, we never anticipated for it to get as popular as it did. We have tried patching as much as we can but eventually hit the wall. So a full rewrite was in order.

  WHAT CAN I EXPECT?

  • Right off the bat, the new chat should be a bit faster and should scale better.
  • A bunch of bugs have been fixed (though I am sure a few new ones have been introduced so bear with us)
  • We'll be able to support a public, read-only chat (often requested for HackChats)
  • Adding new features should be easier so feel free to queue up your feature requests/ideas ;)
  • Most importantly - the core functionality/UX should stay exactly the same, so ideally you won't even notice the change, except for speed.

  WHEN?

  • We're planning on pushing this out in the next couple of days (ETA is Tuesday March 21 2017)
  • In order to ensure consistency of all data, we'll be having a "maintenance window" (~30 min) during which chat will be disabled. We'll try to target a low-traffic timeframe for this (early morning PST)

  Questions? Concerns? Feel free to leave a comment.

  UPDATE (March 22 2017 03PM PST) - This feature has just been released to production. Please report if you notice bugs, issues or inconsistencies. Thanks!

• Key Initiatives // Oct 12 2016

  Aleksandar Bradic • 10/12/2016 at 19:33 • 0 comments

  0. BUG FIXES AND USABILITY IMPROVEMENTS

  This will always be on the top of the list. We're working on it day & night. For more info, check out the Feedback project.

  1. COLLABORATION
  

  Collaboration is what this place is all about and what makes it so special. We need to make it so that it's easier to find people to help with their work. The tagline we're playing with is "Start a project. Build a team." Though most of the users are a one-man-army, we feel that the "individual" aspect is working OK, but the "collaborative" piece needs a lot more work. So you'll see features & talk along these lines.

  2. PROJECT COMPLETENESS

  "Open Hardware" is a term that only makes sense if people can actually modify & build the project. Though there are a lot of well-documented projects on the site, we feel that we have to be way better at this. So we'll be working on ways to make this happen - both from a feature (better layout, ways to organize project assets, etc.) and the "incentives" standpoint (contests, badges, etc.). Schematics/BOM/CAD files are they key aspects of what makes a project "complete" - so we'll work on adding features that make these more of a "living" document rather than just a file on the server.

  3. PROJECT COMMUNITY GROWTH

  The fact that Hackaday.io is a closed community of "peers" is amazing, and we want to keep it that way, but we also know that people get really excited about these follows/skulls and, most importantly, when someone reaches out to them with a "hey that's a great project, I have a skill X, can I help?." That said, with the current audience it's kind of a zero-sum game (everyone has a limited amount of time in a day), and we know there are a lot more amazing people out there, and we need to drag them in. So we'll be working on a redesign of the home page to make it clearer what this place is all about, as well as polishing up the "public view" of the projects. For logged in users - we'll still keep things quite cryptic, that part is for creators and they should make an effort to learn how things work ;)

  Ideas/comments? Feel free to jump in!

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