OpenWack Community Software Blog

Look who’s round the corner? OpenWack dev team with that fire of determination in the eyes!

Starting from today we will be doing a series of dev marathons — a well known way of developing software in Skalfa — meaning creating multi-hour chunks of time for the programmers with zero distractions from writing software. You know how it’s done — when a team of bright people works on one big task in the chaotic zen environment. I’m so glad that in the 5-year old company we still like to get our hands dirty and to act startup.

This means that we are seeing that red finish line on the horizon. We have agreed on all essential nodes architecture and implemented the skeleton so everyone in the team gets down to the hard work of building out details. We make 5-minute briefings every hour or so to stay in touch, correct the course, and swim further rapidly.

You want details? We have them for you!

Starting from this very minute we’ll be giving real-time Twitter updates as to what what’s going on in our SVN. We are not by far setting dates for betas or RCs but this stuff will be interesting for dev-savvy users. Read our updates here: Twitter.com/OpenWack.

P.S. No, this is not our team on the picture, calm down.

We’ve been on a stern schedule of writing end-user features for OpenWack and finishing core parts, and some time ago we realized that we are not going to meet that summer 2009 availability promise which I apologize for. Even this apology came a little late but I believe for good.

OpenWack will be available for free download in winter ‘09-10.

We decided to first test the new platform on our own projects (read WackWall and the family). This will let us debug it to death, get details straight, and add all plan-minimum features.

For OpenWack we will also develop all necessary infrastructure for plugin developers, theme designers and users before putting it for download.

This way we want to release something already capable of helping people accomplish their goals. It will save a lot of precious time for users and developers. Once you rely on the platform you don’t need to completely rewrite (or abandon) your efforts. To make it possible we’re gonna take all the real-life fire ourselves first.

We have seen companies releasing half-assed software. Then debug it for months/years or releasing new versions with completely changed APIs to make everyone adopt. Somebody calls that the only proper way to develop software. But we are the crowd that never opts for the obvious.

We will test the software on paid projects before open-sourcing it.

We’ve “been there, done that” before. All OpenWack is about is putting our industry and business logic experience from other projects into the most efficient technical form possible. The one that we’ve been crafting for 7 years. The mere fact that all future Skalfa products will be based on this platform makes us work really hard to show the world something that can be relied on during the whole lifetime of a community project.

Watch news, and watch WackWall update in October.