Customer StoriesReadMe Blog
Changelog
Back to All
fixed

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of September 14)

September 17th, 2020

Hello and welcome to another Owlet Weekly Update! Question for you—how would you describe the opposite of “death by a million cuts”? I’m thinking... “life by a million snacks”? I’d say that’s an adequate descriptor for this release—lots of small, substantial updates that should speed things up and fix some annoyances. Details below!

📘

Slightly Delayed Release This Week

You may have noticed that this Changelog post was published on a Thursday rather than a Tuesday! Unfortunately, we ran into some last-minute issues with this release. Fortunately, we figured them out. We should be back to our regularly scheduled programming (i.e. our Tuesday release cycle) next week. Thanks for your patience, folks!

2720

✨ New & Improved

  • We're working on a bigger initiative to move away from legacy AngularJS code towards a modern front end architecture (pssst... come work with us!) In that vein, we completely rewrote the table of contents (TOC) from the ground up as a server-side-rendered React component, just like our Markdown engine. What exactly does this mean? We now use good, old-fashioned HTML anchor links for scrolling to different sections, and native CSS sticky positioning to pin the TOC to the top of the page, rather than custom legacy AngularJS code. This results in a TOC experience that’s lighter, faster, and more reliable. And the best part? It looks exactly the same. 💖
  • This release includes some major server-side performance improvements, specifically in reducing the number of requests to our search index and some general optimizations to our server middleware. What does this mean for you, dear reader? Faster load times for your documentation. We love to see it! 🚀
  • At ReadMe, we strongly believe that your documentation should be customized to your users and their needs… even when they tell you to “delete your account.” Previously, project owners had to contact support in order to delete their own projects. This release grants project owners the ability to delete on their own. 🗑
  • I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—even our users of ReadMe Free deserve nice things! Including API access. Well, starting with this release, our dear free users now have full access to the ReadMe API! POST responsibly, folks. 🍻

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • As you may have heard, we recently added an endpoint to the ReadMe API for applying for a job with us! Well, we have an exciting announcement on that front: In the last week, we received about a million new applicants! Just kidding. But seriously, we have since discovered that lots of people want to play around with an API without actually applying for a job. To address this, we’ve added a new dontReallyApply parameter to the API, which, as the name implies, allows you to see the API in action without actually applying. We won’t judge! (But we do see everything you write, so don’t have too much fun with it, kids.) 🧐
  • What is this, mid-summer 2019? Prior to this release, some of our emails were still linking to our old Twitter handle (big thanks to Carlton, who kindly wrote in pointing this out!). Last year, we spent an undisclosed amount of money to obtain the @readme Twitter handle and we clearly we haven’t been getting our money’s worth. But, this release updates our handle in those emails, so now you have no excuse to not be following us! 📧
  • If you post something to your Changelog and it doesn’t show up in search results, does it even exist? Well not that I’m concerned about my readership numbers, but I’m sure you may have noticed that these Owlet Weekly Updates aren’t showing up in search results. Thankfully, we’ve identified the issue and Changelog posts should be showing up in search results again soon. 🔍
  • Good news, grammar nerds! Shinae, the official Copy Queen of ReadMe, got to work on our owl facts (i.e. what you see when you load the ReadMe project dashboard) and finally gave them some long-overdue grammatical fixes. Really sorry to those of you that winced at these grammatical disasters every time you loaded the dashboard. 🤓
  • So apparently, we were using an outdated shade of ReadMe Blue™ (legal disclaimer: not actually trademarked… yet?) for the little lines inside our ReadMe book logo in the top-left corner of the project dashboard. Did anyone else notice this? Me neither. The good news is our eagle-eyed CEO did and included a fix in this release! 💙

Thanks again for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!