🚀 Product Update: Makeday, System Status, Apple TV, & more
Our October Week 2 product update that we share internally with the Crew team, keeping them up to date on the product changes to Unsplash over the past week.
We continued work on the following feed and general SEO improvements across the site, but nothing notable to show you there.
Most of the things that were shipped were related to Makeday, which is a day for anyone on the team to work on any crazy idea they have with the goal of shipping it before the weekend.
Better monitoring of system status
As part of Makeday, Timothy setup a trial for a new service, Datadog, that makes it easy to monitor the health and status of our services. Datadog makes it incredibly easy to feed in the status and metrics from any 3rd-party service and display the information in realtime.
We’ve setup the data pipeline on Datadog and we’ll be working to integrate the metrics for the rest of the API, web, proxy, search services, and more.
Earlier in the week, we also setup Unsplash’s public status page, allowing developers to better see the status of our various services. Like most companies, we’ll use this page to better communicate system degradation and downtime.
Tim also experimented with a new stats tracking platform for us, using Klipfolio to easily integrate our existing stats and track metrics from 3rd party services, like Twitter, Facebook, and more.
Unsplash for Apple TV
For Makeday, Naoufal Kadhom and I (mainly Naoufal) worked on building an Apple TV app for Unsplash. The first version is a basic slideshow, similar to the first version of our Chrome extension, Unsplash Instant.
We built the app in JavaScript, using React Native (more on that in a follow-up blog post). This allowed us to move fast by working in a familiar environment. In the longterm, this means that any teammate will be able to jump in and add features to the app.
We’re blocked on releasing it right now because of the developer and application registration process on Apple, but if you want to receive a notification when it’s live, sign up at tv.unsplash.com.
Better API registration process
Aaron Klaassen, who handles supporting and managing the 3,000+ applications registered for the Unsplash API, worked on improving the API registration process as part of his Makeday.
With the changes to the API terms, including screenshots showing the proper crediting of photographers and Unsplash is an important part in the registration process. Aaron added a new screenshots uploader to make the review process easier, while clarifying the state of applications and adding additional information for application title and description.
We hope this will make the API registration process a little smoother.
TTU: 5.43M minutes (+11.82% over the same week a month ago)
Note: I mistakenly shipped a nofollow tag on the homepage of Unsplash (left over from an early feed experiment) that caused Unsplash to disappear from Google searches, hurting our TTU for this week 😳. Thanks to the Google Search Team and Gary Illyes for quickly letting us know.
