2022 on vAMSYS

[Lukas Jankauskas]

  2022 on vAMSYS

It is that time of the year again, where - depending on how old you are and where you grew up - you look forward to Home Alone re-runs or launch of new season of Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime.

I've been writing these end of the year posts, in one form or another, since 2014 - it is always a great privilege to be able to sit down and write down some of my thoughts and plans for next year and have a willing audience looking forward to reading it - thank you for that.

2022 has been one of these 'what do you mean it's over?' kind of years, where, on reflection - the year just flew past at supersonic speeds.

Statistics

Our yearly post wouldn't be complete without some mind-boggling statistics we share with you every year, so here we go. In 2022...

• 18,525 of you joined vAMSYS for the first time, bringing the total number of users to just over 56,000
• 56,242 new VA memberships were created - 3.6 per user
• Over 200 VAs were created on vAMSYS this year. More than 90 of them are currently active - we wish them all best of success
• Pilots have filed over 602,000 PIREP entities - 314 000 Flight PIREPs and 288 000 Jumpseats.  Around 13 Flight PIREPs per active pilot
• in those PIREPs, users flew for over 668 000 hours - plenty of time to take a roundtrip Concorde journey from LHR to JFK and back 111 thousand times 

Rewind

We have clearly learnt our lesson from 2020 and at the end of last year made no bold promises other infrastructure migration - which I am happy to report was completed on 23rd February 2022.

The rest of the year saw bug fixes, small changes and roll-out of the ready pages for the never-ending v4ification of vAMSYS.

January:

• New back-end admin Pages
• Statistic Generation and Cache fixes, code consolidation
• Removal of sub-optimal 2FA
• Fixes to PIREP Claims
• Fixes to Events
• Import/Export re-write
• Send data to SimBrief improvements

February:

• New Select Page
• New Orwell Dashboard
• Fixes and updates of Destination Map
• Work on back-end admin pages
• New Orwell Alerts page
• Orwell Pilot Pages
• Orwell Data pages
• Orwell Livery Review

March:

• Style updates of the new Orwell design - sidebar collapse option
• Fixes to jumpseat and jumpseat to base
• New Settings pages in Orwell - Airline, VDS, Design and Social etc.

April:

• Orwell Page Builder
• Laravel version upgrades
• New Billing page
• Scorer changes

May:

• A round of Bugzilla issue fixes

June:

• Holidays

July:

• New IVAO FPL System
• Excessive taxi fixes
• Big round of bugzilla fixes
• Rank Management in Orwell
• Staff Management Pages in Orwell

August

• Nothing significant - minor fixes here and there

September

• Nothing significant - minor fixes here and there

October

• Bugzilla round of fixes
• Login page changes
• Staff page fixes
• Other tweaks and improvements related to new VA Application, Billing and access

November

• Fixes to Sounds page
• Code cleanup and minor error fixing

December

• Work starts on VDS
• Leaderboard generation changed and API made available

796 code commits this year - 202 more than last year. 

It has been a busy year, even though oftentimes it looked like nothing is happening and we are moving nowhere. Have we achieved everything we wanted this year? Of course not. But taken in as a whole, and considering the personal circumstances, job requirements and departures of George and Anna from the coding team - I am actually quite impressed we were able to pull this off.

v4 - the modern day Moby Dick

I know, I know - we agreed there is no such thing as V4, however it has been very convenient when describing what I am currently doing - v4-ifying vAMSYS.

What does it actually involve? It's not just a coat of paint where pages get a new design and we call it a day. In some cases - it is; but in most of others, I am rectifying code deficit - entire logic is re-written in many cases with code split and reused better. Up till now vAMSYS was being written fast, not well - v4ifying the thing tries to fix it.

We are also rolling out new technology - static php and no-longer-compilable vuejs is being replaced with Livewire. End result - efficient system which makes making changes easy.

Onwards to 2023

We are not out of the gas yet and want to continue to work on vAMSYS and continue to deliver the system you want. By the time first half of the year come to an end, I hope to be very close to the end of VDS rewrite and, if luck holds, have other exciting announcement in regards to the platform.

In closing, I wanted to say thank you to my friends and vAMSYS Customers - VAs using our system and Owners and Staff managing them. I thank you for your patience, your ideas, money, of course, and the occasional kind word or a joke. 

Thank you George for making sure our new servers tick along and don't catch fire 🙂

Chris, Matt and Steve - You guys have been the rock and the anchor this year. Picking me up when I'm down or kicking me in the ass when I'm lazy - I could not have asked for better people to help me wield this massive ship and make sure it is heading in the right direction. Thank you captains! 🙂

 

That will be all for this year - let's not be strangers and talk only once a year - let's meet on vAMSYS Sunday, which will probably be held on a Saturday 😄