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.

On the 16th of every month, we release an update to the Mattermost server. The release happens on the same day, every month, without fail. It’s a cadence that our customers have come to rely on, and it helps us deliver new features and updates with drumbeat regularity. Hitting this hard deadline every month while ensuring high-quality releases requires clear processes and organizational discipline. This is a challenge for any team.

As a remote-first company, we’ve spent a lot of time optimizing how we work together as a team. In these challenging times, teams around the world are working to flatten the curve by trying their hand at remote working for the first time. To help these teams succeed, we thought it was the perfect time to share some of the practices and culture we’ve developed to run meetings effectively on Mattermost. Here are seven tips for successful remote meetings.