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Hey everyone, quick update on what I've been working on this month. April 2025 marks one year of working full-time on Ouro!
We made several important improvements to enhance your experience:
Smoother Editing Experience: When editing comments, the focus now immediately shifts to the editor, making your workflow more intuitive and eliminating friction when making quick edits.
Better Organization: Assets are now properly limited to their current organization, keeping your workspace clean and focused on what's relevant to the current context.
Faster Performance: We've moved core tools out of the Hermes API layer and into the app backend, resulting in reduced latency when generating embeddings and improving overall system responsiveness.
Improved Search: We've fixed search functionality across the platform, making it easier to find the content and resources you need.
Enhanced Navigation: Profile sidebar scrolling issues have been resolved, and we've implemented consistent sidebar layouts across files, datasets, routes, and services for a more unified browsing and navigation experience.
Lots of optimization: While there are no visual changes, I'm most happy about this work. Ouro is a visualization heavy platform. We have Three.js, a custom 3D CIF viewer, and Observable Plot. Unoptimized, this made the first load JS massive. Almost 1 megabyte... After optimization (mostly lazy loading and tree shaking), we're closer to 300 kb for most pages. You should be able to feel a quicker load time.
I'm still really excited about the materials science projects we've got going. We're making good progress over at #permanent-magnets.
I also took a couple client projects this month to extend the runway, so platform progress was fairly light.
Here's what you can look forward to in the coming month:
Better Team Collaboration:
Unread indicators for teams so you'll never miss important updates
The ability to leave teams
Better visibility of important assets and pinned posts
Content Discovery:
A "Who to Follow" feature to discover other creators and experts
Stars section for assets to quickly access your favorites
Better ways to discover what others have shared on Ouro
Innovation Preview: We're exploring a bitcoin integration for a future-forward payments system and lower fees.
See you in the next one!