Kaustubh
Member • Feb 4, 2018
Getting ready for the next CrazyEngineers
Dear CEans,
It's been a while we posted any update on what's happening behind the scenes at CrazyEngineers. We've been working on the next version of CrazyEngineers and as we enter the final stages of development, testing and optimizations, I thought it's the right time to inform you about what's coming in near future.
We have been dreaming about this since 2011!
CrazyEngineers is getting the biggest upgrade ever and it's the upgrade that we've been dreaming about since 2011. The old timers on CrazyEngineers may remember that back in 2011, we moved away from the old platform [vBulletin] to xenForo. The platform is the underlying software that runs CrazyEngineers.
This was done because vBulletin had its own set of issues and xenForo looked very promising. I'm proud to say, xenForo served us very well till now. But xF came in with its own set of challenges, which I'll mention below. But first, what exactly are we trying to do with CrazyEngineers?
We've always dreamt of CrazyEngineers as 'one' big online ecosystem for engineers around the world. That means CrazyEngineers has to offer everything any engineer - right from pre-engineering days till post-retirement would love to have. That is, it has to be a trustworthy friend every engineer should have. XenForo, back then, was being developed by two very talented developers and we needed a robust platform to build our future.
But xF was new and good developers were hard to find!
While xenForo is an awesome platform; the biggest issue we faced was finding good developers who could help us build the features that we wanted. We had no in-house development expertise and had to rely on outsourcing development work.
Outsourcing turned out to be a super-bad decision!
We were very unlucky when it comes to hiring good developers. Developers we hired kept aborting the projects after getting stuck at the problem and having no good documentation or online help available, and we kept hiring new ones who'd start from scratch!
We lost ~5 precious years!
After losing approximately 5 years we decided to build in-house software development expertise. We also had to avoid the problems we had seen our developers face. We, therefore, decided to pick up a platform that would help us build and test our new features rapidly. WordPress looked like an apt choice and that's how CrazyEngineers.IO was born!
The success of CrazyEngineers.io
CrazyEngineers.IO was launched on August 5, 2016 CrazyEngineers : Hello IO! as a separate entity and more essentially, as a 'test platform'. It's been developed in-house and we experimented with a variety of applications. It turned out to be a runaway success! The platform has about 35K members signed up till date, without any publicity elsewhere!
CrazyEngineers IO gave us insights into our fellow engineers' brains and we carefully listened to all your feedback and suggestions. All of that is now going into the new CrazyEngineers!
The next CrazyEngineers - What to expect
All I can say at this time is that it's going to be extremely different from what we all are used to, but that's not scary. It's going to be even more engaging, enjoyable and useful than ever before. All the popular applications from CrazyEngineers IO will become a part of new CrazyEngineers. CrazyEngineers IO will be phased out gradually as we move over to the new CrazyEngineers.com
In the next few days, we'll post teasers, screenshots and reveal more information about CrazyEngineers. If you have any questions or comments, do let us know below!
It's been a while we posted any update on what's happening behind the scenes at CrazyEngineers. We've been working on the next version of CrazyEngineers and as we enter the final stages of development, testing and optimizations, I thought it's the right time to inform you about what's coming in near future.
We have been dreaming about this since 2011!
CrazyEngineers is getting the biggest upgrade ever and it's the upgrade that we've been dreaming about since 2011. The old timers on CrazyEngineers may remember that back in 2011, we moved away from the old platform [vBulletin] to xenForo. The platform is the underlying software that runs CrazyEngineers.
This was done because vBulletin had its own set of issues and xenForo looked very promising. I'm proud to say, xenForo served us very well till now. But xF came in with its own set of challenges, which I'll mention below. But first, what exactly are we trying to do with CrazyEngineers?
We've always dreamt of CrazyEngineers as 'one' big online ecosystem for engineers around the world. That means CrazyEngineers has to offer everything any engineer - right from pre-engineering days till post-retirement would love to have. That is, it has to be a trustworthy friend every engineer should have. XenForo, back then, was being developed by two very talented developers and we needed a robust platform to build our future.
But xF was new and good developers were hard to find!
While xenForo is an awesome platform; the biggest issue we faced was finding good developers who could help us build the features that we wanted. We had no in-house development expertise and had to rely on outsourcing development work.
Outsourcing turned out to be a super-bad decision!
We were very unlucky when it comes to hiring good developers. Developers we hired kept aborting the projects after getting stuck at the problem and having no good documentation or online help available, and we kept hiring new ones who'd start from scratch!
We lost ~5 precious years!
After losing approximately 5 years we decided to build in-house software development expertise. We also had to avoid the problems we had seen our developers face. We, therefore, decided to pick up a platform that would help us build and test our new features rapidly. WordPress looked like an apt choice and that's how CrazyEngineers.IO was born!
The success of CrazyEngineers.io
CrazyEngineers.IO was launched on August 5, 2016 CrazyEngineers : Hello IO! as a separate entity and more essentially, as a 'test platform'. It's been developed in-house and we experimented with a variety of applications. It turned out to be a runaway success! The platform has about 35K members signed up till date, without any publicity elsewhere!
CrazyEngineers IO gave us insights into our fellow engineers' brains and we carefully listened to all your feedback and suggestions. All of that is now going into the new CrazyEngineers!
The next CrazyEngineers - What to expect
All I can say at this time is that it's going to be extremely different from what we all are used to, but that's not scary. It's going to be even more engaging, enjoyable and useful than ever before. All the popular applications from CrazyEngineers IO will become a part of new CrazyEngineers. CrazyEngineers IO will be phased out gradually as we move over to the new CrazyEngineers.com
In the next few days, we'll post teasers, screenshots and reveal more information about CrazyEngineers. If you have any questions or comments, do let us know below!
