Enter Gen 2.0
Astra has been working in silence to understand and correct some big issues within our organization that prevented us from scaling to the size we needed to, and getting to the future we wanted to. We powered down publicly, and focused on fixing them.
We found what’s wrong, and we’re fixing it, And I want to share with you:
what we learned
what’s changing
what the future is for Astra.
Astra Labs has been in “stealth” mode for the better part of a year. There was a lot to figure out as an organization, both as volunteers and as a company. First and foremost, we faced a couple of imperative systemic issues that we needed to solve.
1. Our codebases (aka, where the code for our apps were stored) were unmanageable with all of the different projects we had going. To accommodate Android users, we built a separate codebase from our iOS apps, and other web codebases for other projects. Eventually, we had too many codebases, and not enough technical volunteers to deal with the backlog from our product & design teams. We came to the conclusion that we needed to rewrite all of our apps from scratch in a new programming language that would accommodate iOS & Android & Web. Moving forward, all of our apps will be written in Flutter instead of Swift.
2. Our designs for every app were different, which was ok when we had 2 apps, but a mild form of torture when we had 5 ongoing platforms with different design systems. We formally built one design system (named Aureus) which all of our projects will be based on. Aureus will also be Astra’s first open-source project, and will be available for ethical tech projects and non-profit organizations to integrate and use in building their own projects.
3. Undoubtedly, our community suffered as a result of the piling development bottleneck. We weren’t able to provide the updates and functionality that people wanted in a timely manner, and the workload put on the organization put a lot of our volunteers (myself included) to the point of burn out in the last few months.
It wasn’t until we launched Aetheria with the full intent of having a functioning therapist platform by Summer 2021 did we realize the challenges that we had accidentally gotten ourselves into. And for that time being, it didn’t feel right to create content, be public, or interact with our community without backing up our mission by making sure our software could handle the load people were requesting of it.
The hard decision we made in March was to stop working on our current codebases, and put all resources into developing our Generation 2.0 apps: apps available on both iOS and Android built in Flutter that follow our new design system. Ultimately this means more apps and more releases for all of you, our users.
Our current iOS apps will receive bug and patch fixes, but no new functionality & changes will be implemented. With a small team of volunteers working on EVERYTHING, we often have to make long term decisions at the cost of short term speed. (P.S: If you’re a Flutter developer who’d like to help, hop in here).
Over the next couple of months, we’ll slowly be rolling out the Gen 2.0 apps, and opening Aureus up to the Flutter community, and eventually for non-profits to use to build their own resources.
Aureus is almost to completion, and next we’ll use that as a foundation to develop Aetheria, Verena, and our 3rd app - Zenith.
We’re excited to share more with you in the future, but know for the time being that we’re building to turn ourselves into the organization that you deserve. We’re hoping to get everything wrapped up and in your hands by mid 2022.
Our users, their trust and safety, and their future is our #1 priority. We’ll be working in the shadows to make sure we meet our original promise: that we build software with no strings attached to get you to the future you deserve to see. With that being said, I’ll leave you with a quote that describes our temporary slumber better than I could:
“Hold onto your voice. Hold onto your breath. Don’t make a noise, don’t leave the room until I come back from the dead for you. I will come back from the dead for you.” -Richard Siken
Until we can get you to the future you deserve to see — ad astra per aspera.
- Amanda Southworth, Executive Director
(1/31/2022) - Aureus has now moved into beta. You can see the test website here.