This year has become the year of virtual meetings — where we all convene together to discuss business. An hour here, half an hour there. Sounds familiar, right? These meetings are a source of the occasional funny moment… “Oh wait, my microphone was still muted.” “I’m having connection problems.” (Sounding like a garbled, drive-through speaker.) “Please excuse my 5-year-old’s temper tantrum.”

Optimizing SQL queries is always fun—except when it isn’t. If you’re a MySQL veteran and have read the title, you already know where this is heading 😉. In that case, allow me to regale the uninitiated reader. This is the story of an (apparently) smart optimization to a SQL query that backfired spectacularly—and how we finally fixed it. It started off with a customer noticing that a SQL query was running slowly in their environment.

This year, due to remote work and COVID-19, work holiday celebrations might look a little different than usual. Most companies can’t plan their traditional holiday party or organize holiday-themed in-person events. But just because you can’t connect in person doesn’t mean you can’t close the year with some team connection. For tips, we turned to our Professional Services and Customer Success teams.

It’s been a busy year for Element. At a glance, so far this year we’ve: As an open source project, we’ve always strived to default to transparency, working on features in the open with our vibrant open source community. Historically, most of this discussion has happened in our public repositories, like Element Web, or in rooms on Matrix. However, most of this discussion is quite granular.

With regards to technology, one of the major mistakes that far too many business leaders make involves clinging to legacy applications purely out of a sense of familiarity. They think to themselves, “Why do I need to invest in something new?