The Mattermost platform is a powerful messaging tool that enables secure team collaboration. Rather than creating unique Mattermost plugins for each tool, Cognitio created a custom SMTP mail intercept capability that leverages AWS Lambda functionality and custom code to create integrations for a number of third-party applications.
This year, I got a unique opportunity to call in at Mattercon 2020 and give a talk about my experience working on Mattermost and open source software (OSS) in general. I talked about how OSS helped me grow as a self-taught developer and how working on issues from Mattermost’s repos helped me gain experience and confidence in software development. In this article, I will highlight some of the things I talked about and also throw in a few pointers related to working on OSS.
Tanay is the Head of Developer Relations at n8n. He has published books on WebVR, virtual assistants on Raspberry Pi, and FirefoxOS. He has been listed in the about:credits of the Firefox web browser for his contributions to the different open source projects of the Mozilla Foundation. I’ve been involved in the DevOps world for a while and yet I finished reading The Phoenix Project only recently. The book piqued my interest in how teams execute their incident response playbooks.
Mattermost 5.23 includes improvements that will help your team collaborate more effectively.
As of April 15, 2020, Mattermost Extended Support Release (ESR) version 5.9 is no longer supported. If any of your servers are not on ESR 5.19 or later, we highly recommend that you upgrade immediately. With our simple upgrade steps, it takes only a few minutes. Mattermost adopts a monthly tick-tock release cycle, with a new version shipping on the 16th of each month.
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.
