the state of altdentifier: june 2019

Autore: Auxim

Let's just start with a big "oops" here. I was supposed to do these every month, yet here we are halfway through July already. A ton of stuff has been happening, and I'm really happy with how stuff has been going, including some massive growth of AltDentifier.

I'm even starting my own company Auxim Solutions to start managing the bots. No need to worry of course, it's still all going to be me, I haven't sold out to big corporate (yet). I'm simply starting to generate a profit with AltDentifier that's getting beyond just a little extra pocket money. Simply put, nothing is really going to change for the end users. Making some money of my work is always nice, especially if I can do it in such a way that I can always offer core functionality and updates for free, while giving those who like what I do the option to support my work in exchange for extra features. While I am exploring ways to give more functionality to my customers, I do want this functionality to be mostly extra, like customisation. I will start making more use of "we" over "I", because this makes more sense to me, as everything will now be done through the company entity, and not through me personally.

The 4.3 update is also coming around nicely and will bring a lot of QoL improvements, such as tooltips on our dashboard to explain settings better, tracking settings changes made on the dashboard, keeping track of invites used by people joining and a lot of other new features, that I'm not going to leak yet ;). It should not take very long to have 4.3 in a feature complete state, at which point we can start sending out translations and doing stability testing, and if that goes smoothly, have the update out as soon as we can. I'm hoping to have all features built and completed by the end of this week, as most of it is already finished.

That said, after this update, there won't be any new features for a while. Due to our massive growth, I want to spend time at improving the underlying code for better scalability and stability. While we do have a powerful server for AltDentifier, we are not using everything the server offers to it's full potential. Ensuring we can take full advantage of our hardware capabilities will help make sure that we don't trip over our success in the future. We'll need time of course to make sure we don't make mistakes, as these optimisations won't come easy, and we're expecting a lot of changes to the underlying systems and mechanics as we apply what we have learned from our previous mistakes, our users pointing stuff out and a better experience with the languages we write in.

Besides AltDentifier, I will also put some time in Nitrole, as it has been neglected for a while. Nitrole will probably also see most of it's code rewritten to a higher standard, it's site redesigned and it's functionality become more stable.

We sincerely want to thank you all for using the bots and services we have made, and we really appreciate the successes and stories you've came to tell and the trust you have placed in us!

I'll see you all again in 15 days!

Sincerely,

Auxim