desktop VS mattermost-load-test-ng

On the desktop platform end, we’re making progress on the diagnostics project and preparing for the Desktop 5.2 release.

On the desktop platform end, we’re in extremely hardcore negotiation with Apple to ship v5.2.1 of our desktop app to the Mac app store. While flexing that muscle, we’re also working on the desktop diagnostics UI. While not technically platform work: floating panels for Calls are coming to the desktop app, adding to the list of differentiators that make the desktop app The Best Client™️ for every extremely hardcore Mattermost user. And if you’re not one of them, you have no business being here, frankly.

On the desktop platform end, we are finally getting native node_modules to work, allowing for deeper integration into each of the OSes we support. As an initial demo of this ability, we will support picking up the “do not disturb” mode from the OS. On recruitment news, we will have the desktop team double in size on August 8, when Tasos will join us 🎉 Which is, incidentally, the same day that Pantelis will join as the web and desktop engineering lead (again: 🎉). That’s right, we’re onboarding half of Greece in a single day (the other half was already working for us in the SRE team).

On the desktop platform end, translations have landed! If you know some language that is not English, join our localization channel and help out getting the desktop app translated to your favorite and least favorite languages! There’s also work in progress to improve window resizing performance. The resizing performance regressed to be comically slow on some OSes, as you can see in my jiff attached to that PR.

On the desktop platform end, we’re making good progress on our goal to add translations to the desktop app, as well as adding native node_module support. We’re also ramping up on how to do e2e test runs in an automated fashion.

Went ahead and posted a feature request: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop/issues/1476

On the server platform side, we’re firing on all four cylinders (now that Alejandro officially joined us 🎉) this week. He started running load tests with Postgres 12, showing a significant performance boost. Isn’t it great when simply bumping an (open source) dependency makes your product way faster, effectively for free (free as in beer)? We’re also debugging cloud production issues around the performance of plugin downloads. On the refactoring side, we continue to make progress on spreading the context love across our code base, and refactoring the multi-product architecture into larger services according to The Plan™️. We’re also fixing a bug in GraphQL that broke guest logins on community, until then, GraphQL is disabled (so if you’re feeling less graphy this week, now you know why).

> Which tool. Curious.

We built something similar at Mattermost, which (funnily enough) is a comparable application.

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-load-test-ng

https://mattermost.com/blog/improving-performance-through-lo...

> Isn't really just choosing which way to throw money at the problem? Hardware costs, vs. person-hours to maintain a thin client version?

That's fair, although the second option has (in my opinion) a better return on investment given by the knowledge and experience gain.