Slipmat Week Notes 29/2026

Site Development
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Goood hello people of Slipmat!

This weeks notes are bit late, but the content luckily makes up for it :slight_smile:

New Features

  • v3 is now running on the main domain :tada: This switch was done after a huge amount of prep work and testing, and it seems that it paid off as there hasn’t been any major issues with the final move. Old next-domain will be now buried but the old links will keep redirecting for a couple of months for SEO-purposes. Old URLs mostly map to new urls and where they don’t public ones are automatically redirected with a permanent redirect.
  • We’ve now switched to date-based versioning. So now that v3 is lauched, it’s also officially retired :smiley: Versions like 2026.7 are much more convenient and useful to a project like this and our open source tools have been using this scheme for a while now also. When you see and talk about any Slipmat versions in the future, it’s easy to grok how recent code we are talking about.
  • Slipmat MCP Server. We now have an official built-in AI-helper tool. You can do things like set up events, work with your stats, read documentation and post bug reports with it using any modern AI provider such as Claude or ChatGPT. Read the full Backstage post and docs.
  • Artists can now add redirects to events like they could on v2.
  • Updated main content on the new Docs site. The initial versions of the pages are AI-generated due to me not being a native English-speaker but the content is verified and cleaned afterwards. This is also a continuous work in progress, will keep adding and gardening the docs.
  • Added back TOS and Privacy pages with updated content. We still need “Just don’t be an asshole”-clause in there as a human-readable TL;DR but we now have a starting point for the new layout.

Enhancements

  • We have a new homepage templates for anonymous and authenticated users. Both of these are in the slightly embarrassed state still but they now look and work more what we need and we will keep iterating fast. Building both of these took quite a bit of time to get some meaningful content generated for the anon home and to get proper Backstage content sync and commenting + syncing built for the authenticated homepage. Both pages need a lot of love but I think they are a good start for the new site.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed a flaky test fixture that resulted in intermittent deployment failures when it failed in CI.

Misc

  • Improved admin stats collecting and created two new metrics; active artist and active user.
  • Refactored our backend logging system so that LLM agents have now easy access to live production logs. This is a fairly big win as it means we can debug issues much faster.
  • Let GPT-5.6 Sol find some optimizations independently from the backend test suite; it spent ~45 minutes and sped up the full suite by ~30% :tada: We now have ~1300 tests that run in 25s.

The Future

We’ll keep improving the site and iterating the features forward. There are lots of artist- and user-related convenience-things and general usability and content-things that we still desperately need to get done, but the pace of development will hopefully be slowing down soon.

After all the important core features are in place and properly finished, we’ll start focusing doing more focused things and bringing in more polish. Our codebase is now extremely flexible, modern, and easy to develop so we expect to keep everything on the site in much better working order than v2 ever was, and also keep bringing up enhancements and new updates at a steady pace. Fantastic to have you on board!