Lessons learned from Build 1912
The major bug in Gaea EAP Build 1912 has shown us how we need to change our development and communication practices going forward.
Hi everyone, I’m the lead developer on Gaea.
We have just released Build 2281, which fixes a major flaw introduced in Build 1912 — specifically, the slowdown that most users experienced which made the application almost unusable.
We learned several things from this incident. I want to share the changes we are introducing as a result of that build.
In a nutshell
- We have enhanced how we develop and test new builds.
- We are going to make this Medium blog our central hub for all major public communication. With secondary updates or announcements on social media.
- We will publish a live roadmap to help you see where features are in the development cycle.
- We will provide “Getting Started” information for new users, whenever we deliver major features or changes in EAP builds.
The problem: the “slowdown” bug
Up to Build 1800, everything was fine. In Build 1912, we added the long awaited Graph mode, which will be the basis of all advanced tools we add to Gaea. Immediately after release, we got dozens of reports that the graph was so slow it was impossible to use.
We were surprised because none of our beta testers had reported such a problem in the last several months of rigorous testing. Upon further investigation, we found that it was a hardware input related issue — which is why it was affecting only a certain segment of users.
It took us over 2 weeks to fix this issue. Build 2281 contains large portions of code that we rewrote to make it hardware agnostic, and consume both stylus and mouse data uniformly. This means touch support may be delayed a bit and added post v1 to ensure optimal quality.
The solution
We have made changes to how we develop and test the builds before sending them out to the public. This will ensure future builds are of a higher caliber.
From time to time, if we are pushing out a build that has not been tested rigorously, but is being published because of features that are eagerly awaited, we will make sure we mark it as such.
We are also going to change how you can rollback to a previous build starting with next week’s build.
The other problem: Communication
We do our best to keep customers abreast of breaking news and other vital information — especially on social media. But we have learned from feedback that it is not enough. For example, anyone who was not on Facebook in the Gaea group did not know what was happening — especially new users who got 1912 as their first build.
We apologize for this lapse in communication. We are making changes across several different areas to address this problem. These changes will roll out over this week and next.
Information hub
This blog on Medium.com will serve as our information hub. We will post news and updates here before anywhere else.
Email updates for vital information
Whenever there is a vital update, we will send out an email alongside a post on the blog. We will make sure that these emails aren’t too frequent. You can unsubscribe from these emails at any time, if you wish.
The Roadmap
We will publish a Roadmap page on our website that will show you the current state of development for individual features, as well as the software as a whole, and outline new features for future builds. This will be active by the end of the week.
Better Onboarding
Since Early Access has a somewhat changing landscape (no pun intended), it can be a bit much for a new user. We are going to provide a new introduction experience when you purchase a license, or when a major new feature is available. New “Getting Started” tutorials are also being created to help you familiarize yourself with the tools.
Moving Forward
With Build 2281 addressing a key bottleneck, we will now resume bringing in all the remaining features into Gaea. April will see all the major features being integrated into Gaea EAP as we move towards the final release in the second quarter of 2018.
