Development Blog August 2020 – Platform Refurb

Another month has come and gone here at Full30. COVID still has us working remote, with our development staff in Central Florida, and our management team and owners primarily in Salt Lake City, we’ve pretty much mastered this type of work space now. In fact, it may be a while before we even consider bringing the staff all into one central location at this point. What we’re doing now is working, and it’s working better than what we were doing before. We’re firm believers in not fixing something that isn’t broken. Now, let’s talk about the platform and progress.

So, if you’re here on the development blog, we consider you one of our core users. We appreciate you taking the time to keep up with our development. On top of these development blogs, we’ve also started sending out monthly update e-mails to keep our users informed on what’s happening in the back end. So, if you don’t always have time to pop into these, make sure you have a user account set-up so you can receive the update e-mails.

Let’s dig into what happened in August.

Full30 Platform Refurbishment and Upgrades.

Full30 Platform Refurb Beta Screenshot

As stated in previous development updates, our core focus for the past few months has been the platform refurbishment. The technology Full30 was originally developed on is out of date. As a result, it’s slow to add features, and it’s slow to squash bugs. This is something that is unacceptable for us at scale, and as a result we’ve decided to take a step back. With this step back, we’ve been able to re-evaluate our legacy technology and work towards fully re-building the Full30 platform from the ground up using new proprietary technology.

If you’re in the tech industry, you may recognize some of the frameworks we’ve been working with. Our development staff has primarily been working inside of the Falcon and React frameworks. Using this, our development staff has been able to lay the foundation for a very modular set of technology systems. These systems, when utilized by our current development staff, will allow us a much larger range of movement in terms of development. Projects that would take weeks to implement in the past, can now be done in hours.

We know. But when are you going to be able to see it? The answer to that question is very soon. We’re hoping to start on-boarding creators to the new system for beta testing within the first two weeks of September. Following that, we’ll on-load a small sample of users to test the experience out for themselves. We’re going with these beta tests first to ensure that none of the key current features that exist on the legacy site have been missed. This does mean a little bit more time spent on the legacy system for our every-day users, but it also ensures that when we conduct a full launch of the new systems, everything will work as intended.

Bulleted List of Finished Projects on Platform Refurb.

  • Built User level interface for Beta.
  • Setup and deployed development servers.
  • Penetration tested data storage.
  • Documented API endpoints in Postman.
  • Optimized data delivery.
  • Created anonymous user functionality.
  • Started setup of networking and load balancing on servers.
  • Streamlined development work flow and process.
  • Added error handling for front-end and back-end.(Bug Tracking)
  • UI/UX improvements for desktop and mobile.
  • What it Means to Users.

    Full30 Platform Refurb Beta Screenshot 2

    For the next month or so, there will be no direct impact to users using the legacy version of the platform. Certain users will be selected and given an opportunity to test the beta version of Full30. This will be done to ensure that no key features are missing from the platform that would break the user experience. Also, this time will be spent finding and fixing any number of bugs that may pop up. Users do things to technology that the original developers never intended. This breaks things. That’s what we need. It’s a sort of destructive engineering process that every quality product needs to go through to ensure that the product is of a high enough quality to be released to the general public.

    Upon release, all users will be brought on-board to the refurbished Full30 platform. All of the features you love about Full30 will still exist. You will still have the ability to leave comments, like videos, and up-vote or down-vote comments as well. On top of this, we’re adding several key features at launch that will improve the user experience. This includes a user-based custom playlist option, that will allow you to build your own playlist of saved videos for ease of use. There’s more user features coming as well, we just can’t talk about them yet.

    Users will also enjoy the fact that the new refurbished web page is much faster. What does much faster mean? Well, videos load so fast that the development staff has considered adding in a slight buffer time because the speed at which the content loads is almost jarring. In short, the technology may be too fast. It’s something you need to see for yourself to understand it. This may be something that we revisit after the users have provided feedback during the beta tests.

    How it Impacts Creators.

    From a creator standpoint, a lot will be changing, and it will be changing very fast. For the first month or so after the refurbishment is complete, we expect to spend a lot of time correcting bugs and improving the stability of the platform so that it is flawless. Once this is done, creators can expect a suite of new tools to help them better moderate and monetize their channels and videos on the Full30 platform. What these monetization tools will look like to the creator can’t be discussed quite yet for business purposes. As these decisions are finalized, the creators will receive an e-mail explaining the process and path forward. That said, know that our development team is already poised to release some of these tools for the creators.

    On top of this, creators can expect video upload and processing times to be reduced dramatically. The older technology was the largest crux of this system that we had originally been working with. Processing times and upload speeds have been dramatically improved with this new system. We look forward to working with the creators throughout the beta process to truly build the system of their dreams. Yes, we will be building the creator tools with direct input from you, our creators. If you want something, we want to know about it.

    Full30 Dev Blog 2

    Mobile App Platform Closed Beta.

    Many of you are already fully ware of the Mobile App’s closed beta testing for both Android and IOS devices. We’ve been getting a ton of really great feedback from you all. If it weren’t for this platform refurbishment, we would be launching the public release of the mobile app this week. Keeping that in mind however, we want to ensure that the users and creators are getting a similar experience from both the mobile and desktop versions of Full30.

    Currently we are re-wiring the mobile app to line up with the systems we have built for the platform refurb. This does mean that the mobile apps will be in beta for a little while longer, but it also ensures that all users will be using the best available technology to interact with the platform and the content creators on it.

    Closing Remarks.

    Full30 Dev Blog

    We’re in the final sprints of this platform refurbishment. We know there has been a lot of ownership changes over the past year or so. We also know about and understand the frustrations from both our users and creators. Rest assured that we are doing everything in our power to correct the course of this ship. We believe that with the platform refurb’s launch, you’ll all be seeing the dawn of a new era in content distribution.

    Thank you for being with us through everything. Without you, our users and creators, we are just a bunch of nerds building a platform for our own pleasure. You guys make doing this every day absolutely worth it, and for that we are eternally grateful.

    Thank you for your time and patience.

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