Happy 2023! As we reflect on the past year, we are filled with pride for all that we have achieved as a team, despite facing no small challenges like teammates battling cancer, the invasion of a home country, and two senior engineers leaving our company. Knowing that in the face of adversity, we still make significant progress on Transloadit, strengthens our determination to keep pushing forward everyday.

Earth at the bottom with a Sputnik-style satellite in the top-right corner. The blog title is in between both.

Platform highlights

Strap in for a wild ride, as we're about to take a tour of the last year of platform highlights 🎢

  • Welcomed the /file/hash Robot
  • Added support for SHA-384 signatures
  • Improved /image/facedetect accuracy tenfold
  • Launched support for FFmpeg 5, which adds new codecs, new filters for noise reduction, and improved hardware support resulting in faster encoding times
  • Completely migrated the website from PHP to React for a faster, more consistent user experience
  • Matured pricing and a dozen of bug fixes for our Smart CDN, which can change files from storage on the fly, deliver the variants to a browser, and cache the results close to the end user. Many thanks to CareGuide for extensive feedback.
  • Brought machine launch-time back to under one minute. This lets us react more quickly to usage spikes on our platform and results in shorter queue times
  • Improved scaling, bringing queue times to all-time low
  • Launched overhaul of our offline backup system, adding support for our new Aurora database, and we now also keep cold copies of our Git monorepo for disaster recovery

Open source highlights

At Transloadit, the only thing we love more than a morning coffee, is our open-source projects. Let's check in on them to see what improvements we're bringing with us into 2023!

Uppy

We released Uppy with the aim of becoming the number one uploading solution for web-browsers, and are happy to see that we've achieved even more than we could have hoped for. But our work is ongoing! Here's what we shipped in 2022:

Tus

HTTP has offered recovery from interruption of downloads since HTTP/1.1. Yet, people creating and sharing content have been left stranded, as the same protection isn't offered for uploads. This stings more, as most connections are asymmetric, meaning uploads are slower, leaving you exposed to network issues for longer. We set out to solve this with Tus - our protocol for resumable file uploads. Tus is a thin layer over HTTP, with implementations in all major languages. The long term goal of Tus is adoption by HTTP itself, and eventually to no longer be necessary, which we have made significant progress on this year.

  • A number of significant tusd performance improvements
  • Rewrote tus-node-server (to TypeScript, now in beta)
  • Worked (and continue to work) with Apple and Cloudflare to get Tus v2 accepted by the HTTP Working Group, it is very likely that our protocol will become part of HTTP

SDKs

  • Created roadmaps for our Apple SDKs, onboarded a new maintainer
  • Flutter SDK: Launched in beta
  • Java SDK: Enabled parallel uploads and fix async
  • Transloadit Terraform Provider: Added arm64 & Template Credential support

Team highlights

On the human side of things we also saw some significant changes in 2022:

  • We campaigned to help out Alex & Ukraine
  • Created a Transloadian “Hall of fame” section to honour past employees
  • We enjoyed the first team meetup in Berlin again after 5 years of no meetups due to COVID and babies
  • Hired Nick (React/TypeScript) & Donny (Apple SDK maintainer)
  • Added support for Apple Silicon so our developers can adopt M1, M2 hardware if they wanted. Since our file processing platform supports encoding tools sometimes even dating back 10 years, and we offer hundreds of tools and low level C libs all compiled for amd64, and since emulating CPU instructions is prohibitively slow, this was long thought to be non-trivial at best. But it happened, in large part thanks to Apple's Rosetta for Linux.

We’re very proud of the team and what they‘ve done. Besides the global highlights, we also asked everyone what they thought was a meaningful contribution in the past year.

Kevin van Zonneveld

“I'm thrilled with the new hires we made as well as seeing existing teammates grow and gain in seniority. It was great that we could connect with each other face to face again in Berlin, the fireside chats about making our company better were a personal highlight of mine. On the nuts & bolts side I was involved in pushing DX forward, which was a primary source of complaints among our devs. I'm proud that we could make the jump from JS->TS for some big repos, from Jekyll->Eleventy, Jenkins->GHA, and support amd64->arm64” — Kevin van Zonneveld

Tim Koschützki

“I am thrilled with the robustness and performance of our platform this year! Despite a significant increase in monthly transcoding usage, we’ve achieved an all-time low in platform incidents, support tickets, and transcoding queue times. This is fantastic! And we have many exciting plans to further improve performance. — Tim Koschützki

Joseph Grabski

“I'm personally very pleased with the content projects released this year. We've averaged close to 3 posts a month (shared between our Dev Times and regular blog posts), as well as continuously improving our documentation and releasing demos. I also worked on the release of our Flutter SDK which I'm super proud to see in use. It was also a pleasure to meet everyone in Berlin and finally put a face to the Slack profile pictures I see so often! Looking forward to what 2023 brings 💪” — Joseph Grabski

Artur Paikin

“This year we focused on much needed optimizations, refactoring and ESM transition (kudos Antoine!) in Uppy 3.0, improved Companion (thanks Mikael!) and AWS S3 robustness, complete most of the docs rewrite for the new website (great work, Merlijn!) and fixes a ton of bugs. I’m happy with the team, it was a blast seeing most of you in person in Berlin. Cinegaming, barbecue and TV tower breakfast are my highlights from the 2022 company trip” — Artur Paikin

Merlijn Vos

“I’m happy to see tus-node-server has been rewritten in TypeScript and reached semver stable, a valuable addition to the tus ecosystem. It’s also great to see Uppy getting more mature and stable every year.” — Merlijn Vos

Looking ahead

We have some cool plans for 2023 as well, like improved AI & arbitrary code support, an /email/import Robot, moving our Smart CDN out of Beta, a Visual Template Editor, and many more DX upgrades to make working on these things more enjoyable, quick, and robust for our team.

2022 was another year where we have shown that a small team can have make a big impact, and we are excited to make 2023 even better for every teammate and customer involved. Here's to a year of health, happiness, new beginnings, and endless possibilities.