As a YC alum and co-founder of Mattermost, I often get asked by early stage YC companies about what it’s like to build a commercial open source business. With the start-up’s permission, we’ve started recording some of the Q&A sessions, transcribing them and sharing the more popular questions on the Mattermost blog in short form articles.

Conversational AI chatbots are a new vector of artificial intelligence use case that makes the user experience satisfactory, providing immediate response. This technology enables users to converse with applications through various means, such as via text, voice, touch, or gesture, which are closely the same as humans. Users find it much more impressive as they can communicate with their vocabulary and terminologies.

A very fun part of my job as a Solutions Engineer at Grafana Labs is getting to learn the ins and outs of a new feature or play with a plugin while it is still in development. So, when I heard murmurs that our latest Enterprise plugin would be an integration with Jira, I felt the forsaken call of the agile sirens luring me back to my days when I worked as a technical writer on a product team.

IT events and technology conferences, once mind-bogglingly big in-person learning and networking opportunities, have certainly changed a lot since 2020. What started out as optimistic postponing for safety concerns quickly transformed into a new reality of virtual-only presentations and even total event redesigns due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now a year later, the outlook seems the same: another cycle of virtual-only events. We have to ask, “Is this the new future for conferences”?

Programming is often thought of purely as a problem-solving activity. This may be true for the lone coder in their garage, but in the multi-person environment of an Agile team, such problem solving must be collaborative. In this article, we’ll look at the role of communication in software development, particularly in an Agile framework. Covid-19 has forced an unprecedented shift to remote working so we’ll finish up with a discussion of how Agile can be implemented in a remote setting.

Our community has been at the heart of what makes Mattermost great since the earliest days. The first community members were people who were trying out the earliest versions of the platform, filing bugs and wanting to make feature improvements. Our open source community has grown, contributing thousands of pull requests, from new features and plugins to translations and documentation.

We’re excited to share that Mattermost has launched Open Source Fridays as a way to help our Engineering team have a structured opportunity to support and get involved in more open source projects inside and outside of Mattermost.