Activity Report 2021 - Engineering

Libera Chat’s engineering team is responsible for developing and maintaining the software used to provide the IRC network and any auxiliary services as Libera requires.

Team organisation

The engineering team ended the year with 14 members, up by 14 since last year. We have been holding monthly development meetings since Libera’s inception, but have resolved to explore a more ticket-based way of working in addition to the meetings next year, owing to a relatively large number of forgotten projects.

Activity

The headline achievement of the engineering team this year must be getting Libera off the ground at all, but we’ve kept busy since then. Apart from replacing our ircd, the team has created at least seven bots, with functions from automated spambot zapping to cloaking users on request, as well as various quality-of-life improvements to our IRCd and services.

We’ve also made strides towards a web-based registration confirmation flow, which is now just waiting on integration work (we think).

We’re aware that we have a lot of technical catching up to do to get IRC where the modern FOSS community needs it to be. The engineering team has devoted some time to this problem, and we’re hoping to announce more about our plans in that direction soon.

Outlook

The engineering team has a challenging task ahead. But we’re optimistic about what can be achieved, and we intend to experiment with new ways of working in order to get there faster.