Arcsecond is currently going through a major feature upgrade, its sixth version. It will bring the possibility to observe and acquire real astronomical data with your equipment, all integrated to the rest of the platform! I can’t wait to put this in the hands of astronomers.
You can see in this post that we’ve started with a pioneering local installation in the Greenhill Observatory, in Tasmania.
While undertaking the work of redesign, I stepped back a bit. One thing has been clearly flagged for improvement these last months: the way Arcsecond is being updated. The frequency was basically chaotic, until it stopped because of the focus for Greenhill above.
Despite being a SaaS platform where frequent updates and improvements is rather the norm, I’ve got feedbacks from people that too frequent updates gives the impression of unstability (which sometimes is). About that, I stumbled upon a very interesting interview of Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, where I learned they are doing well separated updates too. And as outlined in the interview, nobody notices real progresses when you do too frequent and incremental updates.
I’ve thus decided that Arcsecond will have a release schedule that both makes sense, and is easy to remember for astronomers. So, for a more sensible development pace and depth, Arcsecond will adopt an astronomical 4-times-a-year releases schedule (unless critical security issue or blocking bug). That is, you can expect updates of Arcsecond only around equinoxes and solstices!
I’ll try to meet that new schedule as soon as possible. If everything goes well, V6 could be live on June solstice. If I can’t make it, it will be postponed to September equinox! Until then, no updates will be pushed to production, and you can rely on the stability of the platform.
Please, tell me in the comments what you think of that new schedule!
And clear skies!
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