Last month we premiered our inaugural Research & Development Week. Previous to this, developers worked on independent projects during Comet’s quarterly Hackathon. We changed up the format in Q1 to instead have a consolidated focus on high impact initiatives. Our developers split into three teams to collaborate on improving your user experience.

The three projects were scoped and designed by our CTO and Product Engineering Manager. Each team presented initial ideas, proof of concept, findings, and next steps. We utilized this collaborative, team-based approach to mix developers with differing specialties, who don’t normally work together, for synergistic problem-solving sessions to improve the software.

The three topics were:

• Can we make an awesome experience restoring data from the Comet Server web interface?
• Can we upgrade how Comet uses memory when running backup / restore jobs?
• Can we improve how we backup / restore data to and from S3 storage vaults?

R&D week was a great success. We made great progress in all three areas. Some of the research and development work is making its way to become production ready code, and others need a bit more time to become features for Comet customers.

It was rewarding to challenge our team in areas outside their traditional expertise and get some wins on the board over the course of a few days to improve Comet.