2018 Year in Review

Hey everyone,

I sure don‘t have a lot to say here, as I find myself busy all the time. Here‘s a long but vastly overdue update.

2018 has mostly been a year where I have scrambled to make FredBoat the most stable service it can be, given the limitations that Discord imposes. Scaling up to tens of millions of users is not an easy feat 😅

To spare you of most of the technical details, FredBoat now has a very different architecture, with most of the original code from last year replaced in one way or another. That takes a lot of effort from a one-man-team. As a result of this, I should now soon be able to restart FredBoat while your music keeps playing, and you‘ll be none the wiser. At the same time, FredBoat should be much more stable.

On the more personal side

In 2018, development of FredBoat has officially moved from my parent‘s house to a co-working office, generously provided by my new university. Last summer I graduated from gymnasium (Danish equivalent of high school and/or college), and moved across the country to study software engineering. One would think that university would take up more time, however unlike in gymnasium, lessons are fewer and mostly optional.

On the first day of university, I got accepted into its startup incubator. This essentially means that I get a few extra perks to help me grow my FredBoat as a business, ranging from free coffee to free legal counseling. 

As I now live on my own, I am also financially dependent on patrons to stay out of debt in addition to server expenses. Thanks for letting me pay rent each month!

FredBoat in 2019

Now that I am mostly done with optimizing FredBoat for reliability, it is time to work on new features. Apart from minor quality-of-life improvements, work has been going on for a while to add a graphical control panel to manage FredBoat and its queue. Instead of just typing commands, you will eventually also be able to press buttons to manage the queue, while seeing what is playing in real time. I have quite a few interesting ideas for this, that I think you will like, but I would like to keep quiet about those for now. I hope to release a small glimpse of the project soon though.

Your monthly contributions to FredBoat‘s development has reached a level, where I might be able to hire people to part-time assist me with developing FredBoat. This is especially true if I can receive entrepeneurial grants from the Danish state, which is something I want to apply for in 2019.

I also intend to eventually replace the system at https://patron.fredboat.com to make it more robust, while also supporting more plans and means of payment.

Thank you everyone for your support so far. Here‘s to a great 2019 🥂

Photo by Julie Tupas on Unsplash