As I approach my first anniversary at Mattermost as a Senior Technical Writer, it’s fun to look back on what has been an empowering year of daily technical learning. When I joined Mattermost, I was new to many of the processes and tools used by the team: A year in, I’ve now introduced, led, and supported enhancements across all of these areas, and more! I’d like to introduce you to our product documentation tech stack and share some key learnings we’ve adopted.

The past few weeks have marked a real milestone for the Mattermost community. My co-founder and longtime colleague, Ian, shared his reflections on our huge v6.0 launch, and I echo his take on the magnitude of the launch and our new product capabilities. As CTO at Mattermost, I have the unique pleasure of leading product development efforts for an open source platform backed by an inspiring community of contributors and enthusiasts.

Stand-up meetings. Is anyone happy with them at this point? They were supposed to help teams work in a more agile manner but they were already controversial in the before times and moving to fully distributed teams hasn’t made things any better. The same old habits, the same tired questions. There must be something better, right? We began meandering syncs to replace stand-ups as an experiment at Honeycomb, but loved the results so much that we have adopted it across the engineering org.

This post outlines the quickest path available for a developer to use a basic Mattermost app on a local setup. It makes use of Docker containers, a Node.js app, and — of course — a Mattermost instance! When you’re ready to get started with the Mattermost App Framework, here are the steps that you will need to take.

Thanks to a lot of hard work and excellent feedback from the open source community, Mattermost v6.0 is now generally available! This is a major platform upgrade with new capabilities and wider use case coverage, which many server administrators will be eager to take advantage of. Due to the scope of the changes introduced in v6.0, admins will want to plan ahead for a bit of downtime, especially for larger database migrations. Here’s a rundown of what’s new and what to expect.