Welcome to the 5th edition of Open Source Matters: our regular publication about the latest happenings in open source! Let’s dive into the news.

While service incidents can be wildly dissimilar, they tend to have one thing in common: a need for quick resolution. Response teams need a robust, repeatable process to follow that ensures fast, mistake-free execution, especially for those 4 AM calls. Having a documented checklist saved where the entire team can access and use it at any time could make the difference between quick resolution or compounding the problem.

As I approach my first anniversary at Mattermost as a Senior Technical Writer, it’s fun to look back on what has been an empowering year of daily technical learning. When I joined Mattermost, I was new to many of the processes and tools used by the team: A year in, I’ve now introduced, led, and supported enhancements across all of these areas, and more! I’d like to introduce you to our product documentation tech stack and share some key learnings we’ve adopted.

The past few weeks have marked a real milestone for the Mattermost community. My co-founder and longtime colleague, Ian, shared his reflections on our huge v6.0 launch, and I echo his take on the magnitude of the launch and our new product capabilities. As CTO at Mattermost, I have the unique pleasure of leading product development efforts for an open source platform backed by an inspiring community of contributors and enthusiasts.

One of the most challenging tasks for Site Reliability Engineers is to align the reliability of the systems with the business goals. There is a constant battle between delivering more features—which increases the product’s value—and keeping the system reliable and maintainable. A significant ally to achieve both objectives is the Service Level Objective Framework.

This post outlines the quickest path available for a developer to use a basic Mattermost app on a local setup. It makes use of Docker containers, a Node.js app, and — of course — a Mattermost instance! When you’re ready to get started with the Mattermost App Framework, here are the steps that you will need to take.

Thanks to a lot of hard work and excellent feedback from the open source community, Mattermost v6.0 is now generally available! This is a major platform upgrade with new capabilities and wider use case coverage, which many server administrators will be eager to take advantage of. Due to the scope of the changes introduced in v6.0, admins will want to plan ahead for a bit of downtime, especially for larger database migrations. Here’s a rundown of what’s new and what to expect.

We started building Mattermost because there was no collaboration solution on the market that fulfilled our engineering teams’ needs as game developers. These days, we’re a software development startup with many of the same needs, processes, and frustrations as our customers. Mattermost has been 100% remote from the beginning, with employees all over the world.

Mattermost v6.0 is generally available today, launching a redesigned integrated platform. This release includes new platform navigation, plus new features and improvements to Channels, Playbooks, and Boards. A new Mattermost Desktop v5.0 application is released, and multiple features have been promoted to generally available.

Today, too many software organizations are in crisis. They face soaring expectations on delivering digital solutions, a complex and fast-changing array of new technologies and new threats to understand, and a limited pool of experienced developers, SRE, and SecOps professionals ready to execute in modern environments. What’s worse, technical talent is too often misconfigured.