Changes are coming

Software development can be a lot like housework. You can move a table or add a picture, things that everyone will notice as soon as they enter your home. Or you can, say, clean the house, redo the plumbing, paint the outside, huge things that are important but will go unnoticed. In software development, we are constantly talking about adding new features vs removing technical debt or improving performance.

Long story short, we are at full speed into cleaning our house right now.

What exactly are we doing?

Well, it's not easy to say. We started removing Backbone.js and adding React to improve performance and maintainability. We introduced Flux. We redesigned the CSS, added Promises and ES6, added Webpack and Babel. In the process we dropped tons and tons of ugly code, replacing it with something smarter and leaner that will allow us to move faster in the future.

This is taking a lot of time, but we are excited with what we see. We have not finished yet, but are getting close. You will notice it. It's not just technical, behind-the-covers stuff, but instead we have used the opportunity to hang a lot of new pictures in our walls.

Not lazy. Just busy

We have used some opportunities to also slip small improvements separate from what we call The Mother of All Releases. These are changes that you can use today, but maybe didn't notice yet:

• Talk likes: users can now mark the talks they plan to attend in your agenda, so you can assign the big track to those where people are more interested in.
  
• Required comments. Anybody voting a talk will see the comment as recommended or mandatory, depending on the value. We are trying to avoid having scores of 1-star with no explanation. We have the potential to make better speakers, and we believe in being the platform to help in getting there.
• We have silently developed a new super-gorgeous Access Control app that is still in closed alpha. It will hit the Play Store in the next weeks.
  
• Badges for your attendees (yo-hoo!). A web page that you can use to format your badges using plain CSS and then print to PDF. Right now it is available as an open source repository, with plans to get into the UI.
  
• And bugfixes, bugfixes, bugfixes.

We want to share stuff. We will soon. Stay tuned.

💖 Feedback!

Feedback is the name of the new world. Without feedback, we can design the platform that we deserve, but not get the Batman that we need. Or something like that.

We have created a GitHub repository to help us track issues. Feel free to cheer for your favorite bugfix there, see the ones we are working on, or ask for new features. Or just drop by our email or Twitter, that also works.

We may be busy, but we are also listening.