There's probably a few people who follow this little blog of mine who know how my involvement with 
It started with one fundamental piece of software: the Encoder.
I've written at length about it, and even made some videos explaining how it works. It's a piece of software that, some days, I can't believe actually exists. If I'm allowed a moment of brutal honesty, I never thought I could make it work as well as it works today. It's quite possible it wasn't skill at all, but more stubbornness that got me here… but I'm getting ahead of myself.
We formed a little group on Discord: 
A fatal error or crash meant hours of troubleshooting, sleepless nights, a lot of manual intervention, and the same request repeated over and over:
"Guys, please do a git pull. Found a critical bug."
Eventually we got it. Eventually the videos kept coming out. The edge cases appeared, the weird videos with bizarre formats showed up, and each one allowed me to tweak the logic a little more.
What began as little more than a wrapper around ffmpeg slowly became a complex piece of software that does far more than just encoding.
Of course, I keep updating it—because the work is never really finished, as they say. But more and more it feels like asking people to update their Encoder manually is not only ineffective—since operators come and go, and some I'm not even sure how to contact—but also a bit too artisanal, for lack of a better word.
With that in mind, today I added something I probably should have done a long time ago: versioning.
Versioning means the Encoder can now check if it's outdated and warn operators before subtle bugs start creeping in.
The idea is simple. The Encoder itself will now tell you when it's time to upgrade. No need to ask, or peruse into this blog for news.
Cake, right? Obvious, even. But somehow it took me this long to land here with both feet.
At any rate, I hope this helps keep bugs at bay and progress moving forward. Especially because we are in the middle of transitioning a lot of things on the backend of
MenO
