Update on development

I just wanted to give an update on development at Tatoeba. There has been a lot going on behind the scenes.

To begin with, we're rebuilding the team. Developers who were involved in the past but had to take a break are now part of the crew again. Others are learning new skills so that they can help perform new tasks and make life easier for others. Thanks to lool0, we have a new mailing list so that people can communicate via e-mail and continue to refer to our collective wisdom throughout eternity.

In terms of changes that make life better for developers: First, pep has created a virtual machine, which means that regardless of whether developers are running on Windows, Mac, or Linux, they can recreate Tatoeba on their own machines, and can test both how it works now and how their changes affect it. This is a big deal. Secondly, lool0 has moved our repository (the place where we store our code and our problem reports) to GitHub, which is easier for our developers in all countries to reach, and opens us up to collaboration with people who find out about us there. Also thanks to lool0, we have a new mailing list so that people can communicate via e-mail and continue to refer to our collective wisdom throughout eternity. Finally, I've been working with the various translations of the user interface so that the good work already done by the UI translation teams at Launchpad, as well as their translations for all our new features, can be seen live. We are also getting closer to getting new languages and audio onto the site once again. And perhaps it will even become possible to use Tatoeba on a smartphone.

But developers shouldn't have all the fun! I'm hoping that some of you will help with various tasks that don't require you to know how to write code. For instance, I would love for someone to take on the role of translation czar (monarch?), who communicates with the various Launchpad translation teams and sees how we're coming along with making the Tatoeba user interface available in dozens of languages. It would also be great if we could get people involved in testing, whether at the top level (creating a test plan, recruiting and coordinating with other testers), or simply stepping through a list of functions and seeing how well they work. Finally, it would be nice to have a king/queen of collecting audio so that Tatoeba can be seen as well as heard.

Please send me a private message at Tatoeba (or e-mail me at alanf . tatoeba AT gmail) if you're interested in getting involved. And if you want to be part of the development team, visit (and join) the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/tatoebaproject . I look forward to hearing from you!