Every six months, we share our highlights through a newsletter and a corresponding blog post. It is traditionally a little overdue, so let's get to it! 😄

It is amazing to think that it has been 6 years since we first turned the lights on here at Transloadit. The service was built from the ground up by a small team of engineers on a mission to solve the difficult problem of file uploading and processing via the cloud. We knew this was a service that other developers would need as well, and we felt we had the know-how to make it happen in a useful way.

Here's to a great 2015 Here's to a great 2015

As we begin 2015 here at Transloadit, we want to take a moment to reflect on 2014 and what was achieved in the past 6 months since our last bi-annual newsletter.

Infra

During the past several months, we have been hard at work on making back-end infrastructure improvements in order to provide a more efficient and reliable service. Most notably, the servers that handle uploads are now running:

  • multiple instances of our server through Node Cluster, allowing smoother deploys, better CPU utilization, as well as graceful draining and rotation of processes.
  • the latest version of tosip, which has cut our encoding launch times in half, allowing us to drain big traffic spikes more swiftly.

While most of these changes are not very visible to the end user, they result in a greater and overall more reliable experience while interacting with our service.

Robots

There were many improvements to the way in which our robots can process your media. We decided that short lists would not only be easiest to digest, but also most helpful in quickly spotting any improvements relevant to your use case.

We have added the following Robot parameters:

  • /document/thumbs.pdf_use_cropbox which can fix PDF thumbnail dimension issues
  • /sftp/store.chmod which lets you set the permission bits of uploaded files explicitly (as opposed to being inherited from your server's umask)
  • /video/thumbs.ffmpeg_stack which allows you to extract thumbnails from recent video formats via a later FFmpeg build
  • /image/resize.type which lets you set the color type of an image
  • /image/resize.density which lets you set the density of an image

We have also changed how some existing Robot parameters work:

  • /audio/waveform.format now accepts a "json" value, so you can render waveforms client-side and make them more interactive than with the previous (and default) "png" option
  • /s3/import.path can now accept a list of URLs (just pass it an array). Each URL can be imported recursively
  • /image/resize.crop now accepts coordinates as a JSON encoded string

Furthermore, we have added the following cool, new Robot features:

  • create videos from a set of images with our /video/merge Robot
  • merge audio & video files with our /video/merge Robot
  • concatenate videos and audio files with our /video/merge Robot
  • a colorspace meta property for image files. You can store that information or use it to create different flows with our /file/filter Robot
  • an average_color meta property for image files that you can use to choose a contrasting overlay font color or thumbnail background

We have also fixed a number of bugs, most notably one in /file/decompress that could cause never-ending Assemblies if you threw an empty zip file at it.

Integration

iOS

Our iOS SDK has been updated for the new iOS 8 changes and now provides better integration for your application. A Swift version of the SDK is being developed as well.

Go

We recently announced official support for Go with an SDK developed by Marius. Integrating Transloadit into your Go applications is now just a few lines of code away. transloadify is a command line tool leveraging our Go SDK, which makes it possible to convert media on your local machine without writing a single line of code. You can execute Assemblies on demand, or use the directory watcher functionality to kick off Assemblies as files come in. Be on the lookout for a separate post on that subject. 😄

Meteor

We now have a package available that allows for easy integration with your Meteor.js apps. Search packages on atmosphere.js for transloadit in order to find more information and for integration instructions.

Website

We have been working for nearly a year on a complete overhaul of our website and back-end account management system. It has been a painstaking process, but also something that we felt was long overdue. Our new logo even won a design competition! 😄

Open source & community

We love visiting conferences and are grateful that we are now in a position where we can give something back.

Aside from releasing a few new projects on GitHub, we have been trying to help out developers who organize conferences. A few highlights:

And last weekend, we were backing up Static Showdown and Gopher Gala by giving away some hackable drones and free startup accounts.

Team

In 2014, we said goodbye to Felix Geisendörfer, one of our original 3 co-founders. Felix has been instrumental in the growth of Transloadit during the time leading up to that point, and his contributions will not be forgotten.

That said, we were fortunate to expand the team in other ways, and are happy to announce the following new team members:

  • Joe Danziger (Developer Evangelist) - helping to spread the word about our service and as a Customer Success Engineer, he assists our customers in getting the best experience possible
  • Marius Kleidl (Back-end Developer) - helping with expanding our core processing stacks. Marius is also working on getting the tus protocol to 1.0, which is a big step towards getting resumable upload functionality working with Transloadit
  • Fahad Ibnay Heylaal (Front-end Developer) - our new website design is thanks to the hard work of Fahad
  • Milan Vuckovic (Graphic Designer) - our new Robot logo was created by Milan
  • Vincent Becker (Data Analyst) - helping to improve our scaling algorithms and optimization strategies
  • Dennis van de Water (House Photographer) - you'll see Dennis' work featured on our new website

Thanks for making 2014 a great year for us. You know we value our customers deeply, and aim to provide a top-notch level of service to all of you. If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us via Twitter, Skype, or Email. We would love to hear your feedback on how we can make the service work even better for you.

Here's to a great 2015!

-- The entire team at Transloadit