On Monday, March 16, 2020, I had the privilege to (virtually) join Shota Gvinepadze and his students at the Free University of Tbilisi and speak about “Advanced Git @ Mattermost” for a portion of their class time. The following are my speaking notes from the session, slightly modified from the original slides for this format. Keep in mind that the command line examples are illustrative of my workflow, and not meant to be run in isolation.
In the middle of January 2020, I got a notification about the upcoming Mattermost hackathon that was being hosted on the HackerEarth platform. I checked out the hackathon page but I forgot about it the next day when I went to work. One morning, I was surfing the internet sipping my coffee and landed on a website that discussed why employee churn rate is high in organizations.
Millions around the world have had to switch nearly overnight to working remotely. But adopting remote work isn’t easy for every team. Deploying a messaging platform can be difficult for enterprises with high security, compliance, and control requirements.
In recent weeks, the coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of people around the world to suddenly work from home. For many, remote work had been an occasional experience; for others, it was altogether unfamiliar. Now, working from home is the “new normal” for many of us, at least for the short-term. If you are new to remote working, it can feel challenging to adjust as you find a new rhythm for connecting with others and managing the workday.
Mattermost shipped with Spanish in version 2.0 on February 16, 2016. The effort was largely completed by our first translations contributor, Elias Nahum. The very next month, Mattermost shipped with Brazilian Portuguese, soon followed by French, Japanese, and more. Today, Mattermost ships in 16 languages, and 26 other languages are in progress. In total, hundreds of contributors have translated more than 700,000 words. 700,000 words. Wow! I am amazed by what our localization community has achieved.
In person, you can easily tell someone’s mood based on their body language and how they speak, but that’s much more difficult with text alone. Emojis are a great way to add tone to a piece of text and also help make text-based conversation feel more casual, relaxed, and fun. Thanks to emojis, we can chat with much more real emotion than you might get by being careful about your word choice or by including just the right number of exclamation marks and periods at the end of a sentence.
Mattermost 5.22 ships with new features designed to help your team work faster.
Join us in testing an experimental feature set offering additional functionality for managing channels in your sidebar. The features will roll out in stages beginning in v5.22 (April 16, 2020) under an opt-in config setting that can be enabled by System Admins: Experimental Sidebar Features. We are excited to share these powerful features with you and look forward to your feedback. As we iterate on the user experience, we plan to release the features for general availability later this year.
More than 2,000 developers from around the world participated in our open source bot hackfest, which we hosted on HackerEarth from January 10 through March 2. The goal of the event was to work with our community to create open source chatbots that integrate with Mattermost to accelerate DevOps and DevSecOps workflows, and we received many amazing submissions! We gave away $10,000 in prizes, including $6,000 cash to our top contributors.
As a remote-first company, we bring employees and members of our community together once a year at our offsite event, which is called MatterCon. MatterCon isn’t your run-of-the-mill conference—it’s more of a meeting of the minds where we’re encouraged to get to know the people we work with, share ideas with each other, and create together.
