A few days ago, one of our users contacted us to let us know that the IBAN included in our donation page was not correct and did not allow to send us some money; we have now fixed that information, and while updating the site content, we can take the chance to provide also some insights on how the project is going.

Current situation

As our users should already know, our application has long been boringly reliable; this is due to a multitude of factors.

Reliable code

Clipperz application is quite reliable; the main concern at the moment is related to OTP functionality, that is not working for some users. The last message of the thread suggests how to replicate the problem, but unfortunately we didn’t manage to take the time required to look into it carefully, yet.

Reliable infrastructure

Clipperz has been using Joyent infrastructure from the very beginning (by heart I would say late 2006).

And we are really happy customers; our application just runs, and it only occasionally needs a reboot to restore its full efficiency.

As the reboot process takes about 30 seconds, and we have to trigger it about once a year, we really have no meaningful incentives to understand the root cause of the problem.

Very few updates

Our public commit history speaks by itself. This may be seen –negatively– as a indicator of a stale project; or –positively– as an indicator of a mature and complete service.

We do have a lot of ideas on how to improve our application, but the current code base (evolved from the original code started in 2006) has reached its limits; its structure and complexity has reached a point where we do not feel confident making further meaningful changes in an effective way.

Financial solidity

Since 2017, Imola Informatica is providing both the financial resources and accounting support required to keep the service online.

It helps that Clipperz itself does requires very few resources to run; these include both the bill of the hosting facility, and the sysadmin time to keep everything running.

Future plans

We are looking for ways to boost the project, but in ways that do preserve its original and founding principles.

People at Imola Informatica are always looking for projects fit for some collaboration with Clipperz, but the constraints we do value are not an easy match with general industry expectations/requirements.

The new introduction of GDPR legislation in Europe though, may provide an unexected support for the kind of approach Clipperz has always had regarding how to take care of users’ data.

In the meanwhile, we have started experimenting with different tools (at the moment, mostly Purescript) in order to be able to code the next version of the application in a way that will provide more confidence in coding and modifying it, compared to what we have been able to achieve using plain JavaScript.