 As some of you have noticed, I've been conspicuously absent from the channel for a while now. Since PAX East, for videos on our channel that aren't the WAN show or don't involve everyone in the company, Linus has hosted 22 of them, and I have hosted a grand total of two. Am I getting fired? Am I getting phased out in favor of clickbait topics and crazy thumbnails? I've been reading your comments, and I do appreciate your concern and kind words, but no, nothing dramatic. I have been voluntarily re-accommodated to Project Floatplane, and I want you to join me. So what the heck is Floatplane? Well, I'll answer that question, but first, a seemingly unrelated, broader statement. The trend today is for social platforms to grow user count at all costs. This is how they attract online creators and build loyalty to their platform. It makes sense. The problem with this model for creators is that this loyalty is pretty much a gun to the head that says, abandon us, and you'll lose everything that you worked for. As a creator, losing your platform is like losing your job in a field where people are often self-employed, covering their own costs for things like medical insurance. That's a scary prospect. The problem for the audience is that social platforms usually have their own agenda with respect to big data, which is a deeper conversation for another time. These things motivate them to make changes to their algorithm that can benefit the service, but harm the viewer-creator relationship, like delivering trending videos to an activity feed, rather than the content that was actively followed or subscribed to. Or, in another more topical example, they might just up and turn off monetization, because their advertising partners aren't fans of a particular style of content. Fair or not, this pulls the rug out from under creators' feet. So in the short term, our goal with Floatplane is very simple. We're going to take over the galaxy. Or, failing that, we'll build a platform for online content creators to deliver their content directly to their audiences without the restrictions imposed by traditional services. In the long term, however, Floatplane Media's more general mission is to develop really cool tools to reduce online creators' dependence on a single social platform and give them more time and resources to create, while enriching the experience for their loyal communities with stable, elegant apps. It's win-win. So even if it doesn't soar, it probably won't sink. Because it's a floatplane. For the past few months, we've had a pre-alpha riding on the back of our forum, with early access streaming, downloading, mostly working, and the CMS and transcoding systems hobbling along. But that's not the kind of future-proof solution that we ultimately want. And that's where you come in. The true version of our metaphorical Floatplane needs a lot more work before we can start showing it off to the pilots. We need another software engineer or computer scientist to join the team and help us make magic. This will involve brainstorming creative and innovative ways to tackle the myriad of issues that come with developing this type of platform. Communicating with our team of two Canadians on each end of the country, some guy in the UK, another dude in Sweden, and possibly even someone hanging out in Belgium. Extensive documentation and commenting practices to make it possible for others to work on the code that you write in the future. And coordinating with our team members to make sure that what we're building will actually function at the end of the day. And more. In terms of the requirements we have for your abilities, you need to have strong Node.js, JavaScript, and WebSocket skills, along with professional software development experience. The more the better. We don't require a degree or piece of paper that says that you know how to code, but you must roughly have the equivalent coding knowledge of a post-secondary graduate. How you got it is your business. For bonus points, it would be great to have experience working in agile development teams, experience working on complex multi-layer applications and microservices, experience with web transcoding, and a passion for interactive media, modern web content creations, and building communities. We're mainly recruiting for a developer that can do server-client relationship handling in Node, but as a software engineer at Flowplain Media, you will be modifying and hacking additional functionality into pre-existing systems and creating some new ones from scratch. Some of the many things you may be working on include the video distribution systems, both for downloading and streaming, the comments and chat systems, tools for creators to manage and improve their pages and interact with their audiences, elegant, highly available web services to support our front-end platform, front-end web engineering that is functional, beautiful, and has a premium feel, applications for one of the many non-web platforms that we do plan to support in the future, including iOS, Android, consoles, and more, agile tools for internal or external use that let us support our customers and partners for a better overall experience for everyone, and lots more features that we haven't thought of yet. So, after all that, if you're interested, there's a Google form linked under the video that I'd like everyone to fill out before going any further. After we spend some time collecting those successfully completed forms, there will be further instructions that will include where to send a resume, cover letter, and portfolio, along with the details of a timed coding challenge that we will be holding, which I think will be a fun way to help you stand out from the crowd. If you want to be on the ground floor of making something awesome that people will actually use and enjoy, I would encourage you to join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son, or possibly daughter.