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Welcome all to our twenty-first development update. We’ll be filling you in on the new updates to our closed beta, as well as announcing some exciting new additions to the Sociall team as we continue working towards the open beta.

Beta Progress

It’s been another busy few weeks at Sociall, and we’ve made a number of successful updates to the beta. Here are the major changes that have occured over the last weeks:

Optimised scrolling experience of the news feed for stability.
New Gallery feature. Upload multiple images at the same time to display a gallery-like view within a post.
Fixed issue with incorrect unread messages and notifications.
Following/Unfollow users directly from search results instead of visiting their profile.
Multiple other important bug fixes and optimisations application-wide, including styling improvements and resolved issues regarding double messages and user tour on signup

As always, we’re continuing to work hard to resolve issues and fix bugs. Currently, we’re working on the following:

Completing the recommended fixes from the security audit and starting the re-test of all areas.
Upgrading all packages in the frontend and API server to make sure all projects are up to date with the latest releases.
Dedicated notifications page with grouped notifications.
Design fixes for Firefox (thank you to the community for finding these for us!).
Working on a better release structure that decreases downtime during production releases.
More bug fixing.
Further improvements/optimisations to the applications stability.
Working on going open-source with the frontend project.
Slowly moving from Kanban to Scrum methodology.

The Sociall Team is Expanding

As the beta continues to progress, we have decided to expand the development team by almost double, to increase our efforts in bringing Sociall to life as soon as possible.

We’d like to introduce you to our newest two hires!

Andy

Front end developer, specialising in Angular.

Andy will be joining Amir on the frontend of the application, and is set to start with us later this month.
We have also decided to look for another frontend developer to join the team, so if you think you might be suitable for the job or know someone who might be, please contact us! Fingers crossed we can find another talented individual soon.

Rodrigo

Senior automation tester

Rodrigo has created his own open-source testing framework that we will be utilising, to ensure all features and releases do not go live without being thoroughly tested first. Expect far less bugs and issues in the near future once Rodrigo is all set up. He will be starting on Monday!

We are also on the hunt for a talented Project Manager/Product Owner (hybrid role). We have a few options handed to us from recruiters already, so hopefully we will have some news in the coming weeks regarding this.
Another role that we are considering in the near future is a dedicated designer who can assist with product design and marketing materials.

Moving to Open Beta

We are trying our very best to have the application at a state where we can move it to an open beta this month.

The platform is now very stable (still the odd bug here and there, but we’re squishing them slowly!), although the amount of features could be improved. Once a project manager starts with us, we will be able to finally start implementing new features again as most bugs/issues should be squished (thanks to Rodrigo & Andy starting with us). If we decide to push the platform to an open beta late this month, we may halt our marketing efforts until the Community section and Facebook migration tool is complete and live.

Our reasoning behind this is that new users will signup and not come back as content will be scarce. The Community section will allow new users to discover stories and follow people of interest right away, even if none of their friends/family are signed up, and the migration tool will allow users from Facebook to signup and automatically populate their profile instantly.