To the Stars and Beyond

Yes, this is the post, but before I begin and let the cat code out of the bag, let me say, thank you! Thank you for your patience, thank you to all the people who gave Mattrbld a try so far. Thank you to those who took the plunge and started building on top of it. Thank you to all of you who pushed for a free and open source release.

Without you, this day might have been very far off in the future. Thanks to you, it is today.

Mattrbld 1.0

Mattrbld has been with me for nearly half a decade now. It started as a pipe-dream when I first read about isomorphic-git, the library which allows Mattrbld to interact with Git repositories from any provider via the browser. Then it became a scribbled idea for a live preview using postMessage on a piece of yellowed paper. Then, in 2020 amidst all the chaos of that year, it turned into my BA thesis project at UAS Munich.

In March 2021, I posted the obligatory Hello World! and documented my process building out the app. In October of that same year, I followed it up with Tentative Liftoff, announcing the first public alpha version. Since then, Mattrbld has kept growing and maturing. It is a little hard to believe that that first release was three years ago.

Yet here we are. Today marks the day Mattrbld gets its big 1.0 release. A major semver change. There’s no turning back from this.

Breaking Changes

First and foremost, for any user out there, there aren’t any breaking changes. Mattrbld still works just as you are used to. There are, however, two really big changes that warrant this bump in the version number.

First, I have completely overhauled the system with which Mattrbld is developed and built, migrating from Webpack to Vite. This, along with switching from Stylus to SCSS for styling, should make the project much easier to work with in the future. Gone are the days of waiting forever for the dev server to start up (and the missing autocompletion in <style /> blocks).

Second, and much more importantly, Mattrbld is now free and open source software. This could be considered a breaking change, since there is no turning back from this. This version is licensed under the GNU AGPL 3.0 licence, so it will always be available to anyone.

This is scary, for me at least, but it is also extremely important. Switching to a new content management system, especially for client work, is a leap of faith. How can you be sure that that CMS will still be available one, two, five, ten years down the line? How can you be sure it won’t be put behind an unsurmountable paywall? How can you trust it is not invading your privacy and stealing your data as it claims?

You need to be able to access its source code, so you can host your own version, perhaps even keep developing it if anything should ever happen to me (or I turn evil). From today on, you can.

No bugs? Nope!

This release doesn’t mean Mattrbld is finished. It doesn’t even mean there won’t be any bugs (check the issues, there’s plenty). There are still so many ways in which Mattrbld can improve. And I’m not done with it.

Releasing this project to the public like this is a huge milestone for me personally, but it still has a long way to go. A milestone is, after all, just another step on a journey.

What’s Next?

Most of the time I had for my side projects has been taken up by Mattrbld this year and as you can now very publicly see from the commit history of the project, it is moving at a slow pace. I want to keep working on this for a long time, but I am also doing so mostly in my free time. I have other responsibilities and apps that I want to create and maintain, so I need to find a healthy balance for everything. Rest assured, Mattrbld will keep moving forward, albeit slowly.

I want the live version of Mattrbld to be as stable as possible, so there won’t be a fixed release schedule. If you’re interested in running the latest and greatest version of the software, you can always clone the main branch and host it yourself, but I’ve also set up a nightly instance at nightly.mattrbld.com, which you may use. Just keep in mind that it is not guaranteed to work and might break spontaneously as it always reflects the tip of the main branch!

If you’re interested in contributing, feel free to check out the contribution guidelines in the repository. And if you’ve been wanting to self-host your own Mattrbld instance, the process is documented in the docs.

Thank you again for your support, encouragement, curiosity, constructive criticism, suggestions and most of all for giving Mattrbld a chance. Now venture forth and build awesome things with it! 🎉 🚀