Activity Report 2022 - 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 team ended the year with 13 members, down one from last year. We continue to hold development team meetings subject to there being topics to discuss.

Activity

A key new focus of engineering activity since 2021 has been a new IRC server platform known as sable. Sable has been designed from the ground up to address many of the fundamental architectural shortcomings of current production IRC server software, and hopefully to permit us in future to offer a user experience that is more inline with other communication platforms that were designed in the 21st century. At this time, it presents a convincing proof of concept but is still a significant distance from being complete.

Of course, work on the current generation of software has not been abandoned while we pursue future plans. We have developed and deployed a number of additional internal tools, as well as improvements to existing ones, to help manage and mitigate abuse from a variety of sources. We’re also working on a service to provide a unified data stream about network events that our automated tools can use, in order to provide more control over access to user information.

Outlook

After weathering a significant upheaval associated with personnel changes during the last year, things are beginning to settle down into a new normal and we’re keen to get on with improving the network’s technical foundations.