Hello
It's been a while since I took out some time to reflect and communicate about our work at Ente.
This has been a crazy year so far, and this post is an attempt to document all the things that matter.
Manav
It started with a dear old friend, quitting his fancy pants job in Helsinki, Finland and joining us as a co-founder. This is by far the best thing that has happened to Ente. Since joining he has taken over our design and has been filling in every noticeable gap. It's a privilege to work with pure souls like him and Neeraj, and I'm truly grateful to be on this journey.
Ente Technologies, Inc.
We've had our fair share of trials and tribulations, like all companies at this stage. For someone like me who dreads filing his taxes, setting up a remote-first company and dealing with the trail of paperwork that follows has been a humbling experience. Despite having fantastic lawyers and accountants to guide us, the process was draining. I am glad that it is behind us now and that we can focus our energy on more exciting things.
What's more exciting you ask?
Building
The Product
The whole year, our focus has been on polishing our apps so that they serve our current customers well.
Across all platforms, we fixed every bug that was reported, revamped our interfaces, made many a tweaks to improve your experience and shipped important features like album links and family plans.
Mobile
On mobile, the two most requested features were for a light mode, and for the app to be published on F-Droid. We did both. We also rewrote a huge chunk of code to improve how we synced photos and added a bunch of little features (like an option to set a photo as wallpaper, ignoring duplicates during uploads, basic search, ...).
Desktop
On desktop, by popular demand, we added the ability to watch local folders and
to process Takeout.zips from Google. We also battle tested and hardened the
code so that it could backup terabytes of data that you may throw at us. We will
always be mobile-first product, but some customers check us out on their
desktops first, and we wish to leave a great first impression.
Our focus for the rest of the year will continue to be on polishing the product, until it shines. The only two new features we aim to add are:
- Hidden, so that you can hide (and lock) personal photos
- Collaboration, so that your loved ones can contribute their photos to your shared albums
Research is continuing on the on-device-search (over locations, faces, objects, ...) front. Like with all research, it is hard to attach a timeline to the outcome. All I can say is, this will be done sooner than later.
The Infrastructure
We have made massive improvements to our infrastructure as well, which will unfortunately remain invisible. The most important of them perhaps is that we are now keeping 3 copies of your data, across 3 different locations, and 3 different providers.
We will continue to make these investments, in a pursuit of perfection to ensure that our systems are robust and can withstand the test of time.
Our Team
It is serendipity that I ran into some beautiful music, only to find a mail from one of the artists - Ashil, shortly afterwards, enquiring about an internship opportunity at Ente.
If you have ever hired engineers, you would know that it is hard to find exceptional ones. And it is much harder to find those with an eye for detail. Ashil was godsend.
Once the internship was over, he decided to join us full-time, and has been instrumental in adding flair to our mobile apps, and in reducing the average age of our team.
Our Community
The best thing we did this year was starting a server on Discord and Matrix. It's been amazing to chill and vibe with likeminded folks, who are rooting for us to succeed.
If you are reading this, we love you and are committed to designing Ente around your needs.
That's all, for now.
I don't get time to reflect often, and I hope what I've articulated helps paint a picture of where we are and where we are headed.
If you like us and what we are building, please tell your friends about us, it will help us do more, faster.
Best,
Vishnu