Looking Back at YC127
It has been an eventful year for third-party development in and around New Eden, going from (almost quite literally) 0 km/h to Mach 2 in the span of weeks and maintaining this speed has been quite the challenge, but an extremely satisfying one.
We started out the year with a fresh new Developers website: this tech upgrade hooked it up to the same back-end systems used across the EVE websites, making it easier for us to publish content (which I hope most of you have been keeping up with!).
Following that, ESI received a good early spring cleaning. Services that were no longer feasible were removed along with long-deprecated scopes and authentication schemes, the amount of confusing service versions was reduced, and a boatload of visibility was added to ESI as a whole. This meant some core parts of ESI’s infrastructure had to be carefully replaced to create a clean slate, allowing us to make further plans (including new stroopwafel shipping routes to Iceland).
Big changes followed like introducing a completely new versioning scheme or upgrading the specification standard without breaking applications. This is one of the core tenets of ESI; we want to enable third-party developers to build cool new things, and part of that means no breaking changes are introduced without a very good reason, and with plenty of heads-up to those affected.
With the new infrastructure in place, it was finally time to add new functionality. Together with our friends from the Data Team, we exposed Corporation Projects. To achieve this, a multi-month plan had to come together; ranging from the new pagination system to back-end changes that allowed us to run early access programs.
The smooth sailing was interrupted when the way the SDE was being generated stopped functioning. Instead of trying to apply more band-aids, we decided to rework the system entirely, and now it’s published automatically and in a format that is ESIer to work with.
And finally, to top off the year, Freelance Jobs were delivered, once again in collaboration with the Data Team!
EVE Santa’s Interns (working title) - CCP Callalily, CCP Pinky, CCP Shawarma, CCP Stroopwafel, and CCP Troglodyte - wish you happy holidays, and a wonderful new year!