This post is part of a series previously posted in the public "The Platformer" channel on Mattermost's Community server. "The Platformer" is published on a weekly cadence sharing the latest updates from the Mattermost platform teams (web, server, mobile and QA). It's an insider look into how these teams operate, and what they're working on.
It’s the early weeks of the quarter, so things are still ramping up. However, in various areas we’re already ticking off some of the low-hanging fruit OKR projects.
Cherry picks
On the mobile platform end, we remain in “mixed mode”: fixing bugs, optimizing performance and helping ship features (revamped settings screens and search are now close to completion). We’re still releasing weekly updates to our beta. So be sure to get on that if you’re not already!
On the web platform end, we’ve been fixing some long standing bugs, upgrading some core dependencies (React to 17, with an upgrade 18 to follow) and are looking to introduce a new useWebsocket hook to untangle the different ways we’ve had to hook into our web socket stream.
On the desktop platform end, we’re making good progress on our goal to add translations to the desktop app, as well as adding native node_module support. We’re also ramping up on how to do e2e test runs in an automated fashion.
On the server platform side, we’re maturing our GraphQL implementation with Grafana monitoring, optimized auth checks and more attributes to fetch. Our work to add more context to our logging continues.
On the QA platform side, we helped ship a new batch of cloud and on-prem releases. On the automation side we’re setting up a swarm of Macs to run builds and ultimately detox tests for our mobile app.
Drinking from the firehose
Platform involves work in many of our “highest traffic” repositories. I’m still figuring out reasonable ways how to keep up with what’s happening in the webapp, server, mobile repos as well as everything related to QA.
When I joined Mattermost, the amount of Github notifications I started receiving was so overwhelming that I just turned everything off. Only if people would explicitly mention me, or assign things to me I’d be notified, via the Mattermost Github plugin.
That’s been serving me well in terms of peace of mind, but it also kept me in a state of FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out. I bookmarked the PR pages of some of the repos relevant to me, and sometimes cycle through them, but it’s hard to see where the new activity is happening. It hasn’t been great.
So this week I decided to open the flood gates again and drink from the firehose: I enabled notifications on all repos I am watching (which by default turned out to be every single repo in our organization) and bit by bit unwatching ones that are less relevant to me. Now, step by step sanity is coming back. I’m trying to curate specific repos, and PRs, unfollowing ones that are not relevant to me. It’s tough though. As it turns out, there is a ton of stuff happening in this company. My Github notification inbox is hardly ever empty, the little blue dot keeps lighting up.
How do you all deal with this? Are you using Github’s inbox? Are you relying on the Mattermost Github plugin? Do you have other strategies to deal with the flood?
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