Matrix

When you work on a team, it's useful to have notifications go to a chat room where you can coordinate any necessary action. Reviewing a comment before publishing, seeing stories as they are written, getting notified of new orders are the kinds of things we like having in a shared room.

In the spirit of the holidays, we're doing a few posts on Free/Open Source projects that we use every day, that isn't what we sell.

In our quest to get all things into Matrix, we've also sent Salt events into a Matrix room. This is extremely useful to monitor the results of automatic highstate runs, individual commands, etc.

We just added Matrix notifications to an old Icinga server we have, because why not? We love having everything in Matrix...

As of today, the Drupal Matrix API module now supports sending messages to a room via Rules. Now you can automatically configure notifications to Matrix rooms without touching any code!

!remind me to respond to Bill in 2 hours

Last week the Note to Self podcast put together a thought-provoking, action-inspiring series called The Privacy Paradox.

Panacea, or disaster? Drupal 8 Configuration Management was supposed to solve all our woes when it came to dealing with deploying configuration. In many ways it's a vast improvement, but in some ways it has almost made matters worse.

People who know me know I can get stubborn when I get sold on a particular technology. For the past year, my favorite is Matrix, a distributed chat system that addresses pretty much everything anyone wants from a messaging system. The only catch? Not that many "regular people" are using it yet.

[Update: a few days after I published this, Vector.im rebranded as Riot.im. It's the same project, just a new name...]

In 5,000 years, will anybody be able to read (or even access) things we put online today? Here at the dawn of the information age, we are creating the archetypes that have big implications, possibly for thousands of years. There's a bunch of recent science fiction stories that imagine various futures, written with the perspective of today's web, extrapolating where things might go as humanity evolves.

Its name is Watney. Watney lives in Matrix. Watney is a bot I created about 6 months ago to start helping us with various tasks we need to do in our business.

Watney patiently waits for requests in a bunch of chat rooms we use for internal communications about each website we manage, each project we work on. Watney does a bunch of helpful things already, even though it is still really basic -- it fetches login links for us, helps us assemble release notes for each release we do to a production site, reminds us when it's time to do a release, and kicks off various automation jobs.