This month's update is from the dev team!
First off, some numbers:
Total completed posts: 118,993
Total volunteer count: 3761
So what have we been up to? We've been laying the groundwork for something super exciting...
...LEAVING BETA.
(we're not there yet, though. Almost!)
We've been in beta for three and a half years now slowly working out kinks and finding lots of places where things can go sideways, so for the past year, we've been focused on taking everything we've learned from running this subreddit and putting into a complete rebuild!
New technology never comes fast, but doubly so when everyone involved is a volunteer. Eight people from around the world have lent their skills and expertise to help make this the best project ever! For those interested, here are some of the details:
Simplifying how the bots communicate with each other and with Reddit to reduce our overall footprint on the system
Finally fixing our mistreatment of Redis and moving to SQL (Postgres)
Completely revamping our website and dropping the Ruby language entirely
Vastly increasing our data management capabilities
Designed from the ground up with GDPR and privacy in mind
Better oversight for our entire tech ecosystem
Adding an API and potential integrations with third party apps
Completely rebuilding our donation portal and making it wayyyy more stable
Complete infrastructure redesign for better disaster recovery and scalability (check out Hashicorp's Nomad if you're interested)
Lays a solid platform for us to build new features on and extend into the future
We're all tremendously excited about this -- as with everything else that we've worked on so far, we will open source as much as we can (everything except keys and a handful of very specific things related to deployment, basically).
I'm so proud of the work we've accomplished over the last year bringing this new system to life; special shoutouts to:
u/personal_opinions -- wizard sysadmin behind making all of these projects functional
u/kwaaiedronk -- meticulous oversight of the new API and some massive cleanup efforts
u/jmk_2017 -- taking the lead and building a brand new bot for our modchat that helps with scheduling, orchestration, and other stuff (and is already open sourced!)
As always, thanks to YOU for reading this! If you're not a volunteer and interested in getting started, check out the links at the bottom of this post to get started!