Status Community Engineering: Audio Messages from a Status Ambassador
An ongoing goal for Status is to be a decentralized organization that relies on open source contributions from a broad community of invested individuals. We are always working to move closer to that vision by enlisting community ambassadors in education, community management, and development.
In this spirit, Status Ambassador tbenr built out audio messages as a community contribution to Status. Audio messages are a new feature in Status v1.5 that demonstrates how amazing community members support Status.
The code for audio messages on github shows the elements tbenr built to bring this vision to life. This feature adds messaging functionality within the strict privacy requirements of the Status messaging protocol and continues to build out useful features to make Status a quality alternative messenger.
We asked tbenr about his experiences creating this feature, and wanted to share how this outstanding community member contributed, grew, and ultimately saw his efforts in production.
Q: How did you decide to build out audio messages as part of the Status app?
It had been a while since my last dev contribution. I said to me: "I'm wasting time looking at crypto price movements instead of building! Let's dive into Status issues to find out something for me"
Q. Were the any unique challenges in building with p2p technologies?
From a protocol perspective, this feature is leveraging 99% of the functionality already developed in status-go for the image sending feature. For the little missing part I worked with @cammellos, the collaboration went really smooth, he is great.
Take away: when the team is strong, challenges are easy :)
Q. Why do you think that audio messages are important for Status?
I perceive it as an important feature for a messaging app: so many people like to send voice messages instead of writing them. It's a feature that most users simply take for granted.
Q: What is it about Status that drove your passion to own this feature?
I have an audio dev background and I like audio\music stuff in general. There were no audio\sound capability yet included in Status codebase, so the github issue was clearing waiting for me :)
tbenr is one of many incredible supporters building, sharing, growing, helping bring Status to the vision we strive for. Thank you tbenr, and all of our ambassadors and contributors for making Status great.
There are many ways to get involved ⬇️
- Dive into our docs to see where you can start tinkering and improving Status
- Join Discuss and look through feature requests
