As founder, I (Adam Brault) have served as CEO of &yet since day one, and today we're making a change.
Our website says, "&yet is about people."
I believe priorities are what you do, not what you say they are.
We say that &yet is about people not as a cute feel-good line, but because we think it's the right thing to do, it's effective, and it works.
We want to make Talky into a fully open and people-friendly alternative for realtime communication on the web and on mobile devices.
But we don’t just want Talky to be an open alternative to existing video chat options. We want it to be the absolute best solution.
We’ve already added some of the key features you’ve requested to the beta version of Talky:
It gives us really deep joy to be able to officially announce that RealtimeConf will return in full force for 2015.
No, we aren’t telling you anything about it.
Yet.
Okay, we’ll tell you some stuff.
Yesterday Microsoft announced Vorlon.JS, an open source tool for remotely debugging and testing your JavaScript. The team behind it wants to make debugging easier, quicker, and more consistent for developers across multiple platforms.
That’s a goal we very much support and we’re excited we could play a role in getting Vorlon.JS ready for this release.
We’ve built and contributed to a handful of open source projects ourselves, so Microsoft asked us to help them in open sourcing Vorlon.JS. As open source veterans, Henrik, Philip, and Bear helped improve the developer experience of using the software and setting it up for community contributions.
Talky started as an interesting demo two years ago this February, but it became a product that has seen thousands and thousands of new users each month.
We believe Talky can be an independent communication platform built entirely on open-source technologies (both our own code as well as great projects like Jitsi, Prosody, and restund). We believe we can do it bootstrapped without VC funding or the support of a telco—and with security and your privacy in mind.
In fact, it already is all of these things!
Fippo and I gave a talk this week at Fluent covering:
Gar even was able to make a cameo appearance to kick off the talk with an acapella Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney cover with some twisted lyrics:
WebRTC and ORTC live together in perfect harmony side by side on my laptop keyboard Oh, Lord, hopefully...?
Node has changed the way we write applications at &yet. Not just sort of changed, in fact, if it didn’t sound so cliché I would use “revolutionized” to describe it.
How so? Well, if I were forced to pare it down to a single word it’d be “modularity.”
Annoyingly, the word “modular” doesn't really mean much. Of course every developer strives to write modular code, so let’s disambiguate it a bit.
&yet has long been a rambling crew of professionals.
We love making products for clients, but we also love helping other teams solve particularly annoying problems or augmenting their talent with some of our focused expertise.
In spite of our penchant for bleeding edge technologies, we have an extremely veteran crew. Most of our engineers are more than halfway through their second decade in the software field, quite a few starting their third—and some longer than that.
When we set out to build a security consulting offering, we did so by creating a distinct division: ^lift security. ^lift has gone on to be a fixture of the Node community, leading the way in all things security.
Earlier today our friends at Digicoop released Kaiwa, a great new text chat app for the web with a super-friendly user experience. We’re keen on the fact it's built on top of some of the open source code we’ve been working on for years, such as the Stanza.io library for XMPP in JavaScript.
Yeti Lance Stout created a prototype application called Otalk.im along these lines a while back (as demonstrated at RealtimeConf 2013 starting around 16:45), and through the beauty of open source software the Digicoop team forked that code as the foundation for Kaiwa.
Congratulations, Digicoop!
Recently, Chrome’s WebRTC product manager, Serge Lachapelle, asked a critical question about WebRTC “product of the year” awards:
I see all these webrtc product of the year awards... And here I am wondering how come Chrome has not won one yet.
— Serge Lachapelle (@slac) March 25, 2015We agree!