Tuesday, October 15, 2013

About Kaya.gs

Hey everyone. Its been a really long while since I write a post and I owe all our users more information about what is going on.


Since March I started working for Scribd.com and in July I moved indefinitely to San Francisco. Im part of the front-end team of Scribd and among learning loads of css (thing dp used to do exclusively on Kaya) I work on pages and projects that move millions of users everyday.

That is a tall order and its demanding a lot from me, adding to that moving to another country and living in another language.

Dp himself also has a new job and with it, very big responsibilities and deadlines: he manages a team and he has to deliver projects by very tight deadlines in competition with other teams.

Since March Kaya hasnt advanced the way we wanted and envisioned Kaya to live forever: as a permanent improvement development. Knowing that supporter funding would not be enough in the long run, one of our ideas has always been to open source Kaya and tap community contrinbutions and development power. Thats why OpenKaya exists.

We want to open up the server entirely, but doing so without preparation is stopping us from doing it straight up. It can be very daunting to run thousands of lines of code with a double server architecture as we have.

I personally also applaud the efforts of Nova.gs, which have been doing very well in the past 8 months or so. I suggest they put efforts into the open source side if they ever plan to do it as it becomes more difficult to do later on.

As a post-mortem, my biggest technical regrets are not working towards an open code early on (even if we kept it closed) and not automating server recovery, thing that plagues Kaya even today when there is a system crash.
We were also hit very hard by technologies that changed abruptly from 2011 (when Kaya started being developed) into oblivion, which made me do custom maintenance of code no longer supported by its original writers.