For all intents and purposes, 2021 was a jam-packed year for Mattermost, our contributors, employees, customers, and extended community. We broke through the muck that was a challenging 2020, and shared in celebration as we delivered the first open source collaboration platform to feature messaging, project and workflow management all in one convenient suite. But 2021 was about more than just our major platform 6.0 announcement in October.
The majority of engineers know that a minor misconfiguration might lead to some big troubles. Usually, we tend to forget the importance of that tense when we are configuring a new tool or a new service, as our focus is initially to make the tool functional and to evaluate if it fits our needs. Mattermost Cloud hosts thousands of workspaces which each one needs to have a different database backend, as in Mattermost we think that isolation is one very important aspect in our security guidelines.
The database/sql package in the Go standard library maintains a pool of connections so that all queries going through a single *sql.DB instance will reuse the same pool. This is great because you get a connection pool out of the box. But what if you need to share the same connection pool across processes? How do you use the same API in different processes but still reuse the same pool?
Ask any software engineer about the best way to do something and they’ll likely tell you “it depends.” Every project and team works differently and has specific concerns, requirements, and opinions, adding complexity on top of the technical and operational complexity of software development. The challenge lies in managing the work and emergent complexity while staying abreast of industry best practices in a way that fits our teams’ particular processes and environments.
With a nearly endless array of open source projects available to contribute to these days, knowing where to start contributing can feel easier said than done. Need some inspiration? Whether you’re new to the world of open source, are gearing up for Open Source Fridays in the new year, or just want to see what other folks are excited about, check out a few of our favorite open source projects to contribute to in 2022.
In the first part of this series, we explored the fastest way to get started with Mattermost Apps. In the second installment, we looked under the hood of a Mattermost App and examined how it works and how its components interact with each other. In this piece, we’ll outline the various authentication methods available using the Mattermost Apps framework.
Mattermost v6.2 is generally available today and includes the following new features (see changelog for more details).
In a recent blog post, I introduced the tech stack our Mattermost Technical Writing team uses every day to build, contribute to, improve, and maintain the Mattermost product documentation at docs.mattermost.com. Building on this knowledge, I’d like to share more about how we work as a writing team, the branching strategies we’ve learned to adopt, and the review workflows every documentation contribution goes through before being merged into the codebase.
Welcome to the 6th edition of Open Source Matters: our regular publication about the latest happenings in open source! Let’s dive into the news.
In the first part of this series, we outlined the basic steps you need to take in order to begin setting up a developer environment, installing your first app, and making use of the first commands. In this installment, we’ll aim to answer the most common questions about what was installed, how it works, and how the various pieces interact with each other. Additionally, this post will lay out all the different components that are involved in the overall lifecycle of a Mattermost app.
