Apollo in 2021

2020 was quite the year; I don't need to go into the reasons why. But amidst it all, Apollo was able to help connect people from all over the world, something I'm very grateful to have played a part in. But even more so, I'm grateful for all of you!

I wanted to take some time to highlight the places we've been in 2020, and to paint a picture of my plans for Apollo moving forward into 2021.

A year ago, Apollo was much smaller than it is today. On January 1st 2020, Apollo was on 2,700 Discord servers. Fast forward 366 days later (2020 was a leap year), and Apollo is now on over 41,000 servers. That's a big jump!

Last year was filled with excitement, as well as a healthy amount of stress (in a good way). Delivering new features to all of you is one of the best feelings, and scaling up Apollo to perform under pressure has been a fun project. I'm always learning how we can do things better, where we can improve, and ultimately how to continually push the envelope of what we all want Apollo to be.

I want to thank all of you for your contributions in the Apollo Discord server. I love that we have such an active community, and your suggestions and feedback are always a joy to receive. It's refreshing to see how you are using Apollo; it helps me gain a better understanding of the many use cases that Apollo solves. So once again, thank you!

Speaking of suggestions, let's chat a bit about what we have planned for 2021!

If you've been on Trello as of late, you'll know that we have no shortage of ideas and suggestions on how to make Apollo better. While there's many we plan to get to at some point, I want to highlight some of our short term goals.

On my end, I spent most of my dev time in December migrating (almost) all of our recurring events to what I'm calling recurring events V2. So far this hasn't amounted to anything from a user facing perspective, but it'll allow us to build out much more flexibility with how recurring events are handled. The old system was strictly tied to posting new events relative to the previous event in the series, and was also using a very archaic algorithm for recurrence patterns. The new system will allow for posting events relative to the next event in the series, a custom offset for when events are posted, and will offer much more in the way of recurrence patterns. Stay tuned for more information on when you can help us with some pre release testing!

TMC is currently working on adding the option to restrict event signups to a set of Discord roles. This will be a Premium only feature, and will have the option to restrict signups either at the event level, or for specific signup options. I'm pretty excited for this feature! An issue that my Destiny 2 clan is currently facing is the notion of making member only events, but also allowing the various folks who we play with occasionally to still have visibility into what we're doing, and to allow the event to be converted to have open signups so they can join closer to the start time.

As with most features, we don't have any timelines on when to expect either of these, but know that they're both in progress, and you'll be the first to get your hands on them!

Beyond those two features, some other short term goals I have are doing a bit of an overhaul for how events are modified, as well as adding more modification options. I'm talking about things like modifying attendees directly (yes, I said it), better UX for editing, and event cancellations. I'd also really like to come up with a solution for assigning an existing channel as an event channel, or to allow events to exist outside the context of an event channel altogether. Feel free to drop me a line on ideas for that last one!

Beyond those new features, there's also the ever present need to keep on top of the technical side of things. Server infrastructure, deployments, reducing downtime, etc. Apollo is always growing, and so are our needs!

One last project that I plan on doing some work on in 2021 is an overhaul of our web presence, including a brand new website, with a comprehensive set of command documentation and other guides. This is still in the early stages, but it's something I'm quite excited about!

That's all I have for you today. I really should do these posts more often, but usually when I sit down to work on Apollo, I can't wait to dive into the code!

Thank you for all your support in 2020, and here's to a better year in 2021!

- Asal