(this post was edited on 24th Feb. 2021 to include links to videos and corrections)

The CryptPad team is taking part in the 2021 online edition of FOSDEM. We will use this opportunity to reflect on the past year from a couple of different perspectives.

Aaron MacSween's presentation is about the technical challenges faced by the team this year. The massive influx of users working from home pushed us to scale CryptPad to accomodate an additional 60K weekly active users. This was made easier by the platform's unique architecture, where most of the "expensive" work involving cryptography happens on the client rather than the server. Additional challenges involved a 27 hour outage due to a cooling malfunction at our hosting provider. While the outage itself was out of our control, it brought into sharp relief that our procedures to mitigate uncertainty had not scaled with our user-base. Aaron will speak about what we plan to do to avoid such situations in future.

In the design devroom, I will reflect on my first year as the designer on the CryptPad team. My work has been spread across many different areas, from UI design to answering support tickets, writing the product and documentation, as well as visual identity. All of these elements boil down to one thing: communication. I will show some examples of work produced this year as attempts to improve how CryptPad communicates, from onboarding to daily-use. I will conclude with one of the challenges for the year ahead: accessibility. Communication is all well and good, but of no use if it cannot be heard on a screen reader.

Talks are pre-recorded and will be aired on Saturday 6th February. For more information, abstracts, and broadcast time with Q&A session, see the indications below.

This blog post will be updated with video embeds once these are available.

Living on the edge with CryptPad

• Speaker: Aaron MacSween

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Aaron was unable to include his presentation in the FOSDEM track. However he still recorded it so we are making it available here and on our PeerTube channel.

Watch on the CryptPad Peertube channel

Communicating CryptPad

• Speaker: David Benqué
• Track: Open Source Design devroom
• Room: D.design
• Day: Saturday
• Start: 13:30 (CET)
• End: 13:50 (CET)

Watch on the CryptPad Peertube channel