1 November, 2021

October 2021 change log

Major flespi improvements in October 2021.

When I was young I always thought that the best season is summer with warm and stable weather. But this and the previous year the autumn colors made me crazy happy each day. Probably I’m getting older or this is due to moving to Vilnius which is the greenest capital in Europe. Who knows, but this October again was especially colorful with a mix of green, yellow and red colors, sometimes rainy, windy, and cold, but most of the time sunny, dry, and warm.

We finished October with 99.9994% uptime in the EU region due to a very short downtime that lasted a few seconds and due to another very short period that was not even reported into our NOC. In the RU region, the uptime in October was 100% as usual. By the way, you can track the whole uptime history of flespi from the very beginning on our status page. Each column represents an uptime mark for a month and if you click on it you can read the associated changelog article.

In the last week of October, we had our second team meeting in Vilnius where we discussed a number of important points determining our future vector and worked together for the whole week. I do not know who says that remote work, in the long run, allows one to maintain the same level of productivity as work in the office. This is probably true only for a short period of time or for work where a person is a part of a well-known and stable process. Or when a person is responsible for the autonomous system as a whole. But if you are involved in the creative groupwork of a development team when you are doing something new that nobody has done before, regular personal communication is a must-have. Maybe it was a short-term emotional boost, but when we meet all together, sit, and work in one room like in the good old times, our total productivity doubles at least. 

Anyway, our reality changed and what effectively worked three years ago is currently impossible for a variety of reasons. Among the decisions we made that week are obviously regular meetings throughout the year that will maintain our overall productivity on a higher level. Of course, remote work has its benefits — for example, I’m now writing this changelog from Groningen, the Netherlands right near the heart of our primary data center that is servicing the EU region

Among the topics we discussed and decisions we made that week the most important are:

  • The stable growth of the customer base results in more and more questions, especially on the onboarding and PoC stages, that makes us invest more and more efforts to address them. We decided to automate replies to the most common questions and to enrich our team with a new member that will help us in this direction.

  • As we have more and more integrated protocols and more and more users ask us for “special” processing for “special” projects, we decided to address this demand by expanding the flexibility of device plugins. We will soon allow using standard parameter names in plugin fields, converting and changing their values based on custom expressions. What is even more important, we will allow our users to use their own algorithms in plugins. This will coexist with and partially take some functionality from the post-processing channels concept.

  • As more and more flespi users ask us to develop something special and as we have quite a few companies experienced in flespi-based development, we decided to develop a market where companies that need a telematics or IoT project to be implemented can find a company that is specialized in IoT and telematics and provide software development services. The first step in this direction is the reactivation and actualization of our partners page.

One, but very important feature we recently introduced is access to REST API logs. It is available under the Platform section of Toolbox. This feature moves flespi transparency to the next level.

We also moved our tariffs from USD into EUR. Given that UAB Gurtam is a European legal entity with EUR being a standard currency, there are many local reporting and compliance processes and procedures that streamline with the transition to EUR. All existing flespi commercial users can choose to stick to the USD tariff but in that case, they will not have access to the new features we will release. 

We consolidated our knowledge of remote device management options into another article, which I recommend you to read if not yet.

In November we plan to concentrate on implementing the things we discussed during our team reunion and will continue providing you with the quickest, most stable, and featureful telematics backend in the world. Stay connected!