Extremely Corporate:History
This document is here to answer questions no one asked, but which I feel like answering. Partly because it's something to do and partly because it might be nice to put some of these things in writing.
Pre-History
The idea of Extremely Corporate (EC) probably emerged in its earliest form in 2013 when I first hosted a Minecraft server. I actually hosted many Minecraft servers from 2013 until 2016, each of which invariably only lasted a few months until either some technical issue stood in the way of using the same world or I and the people I was playing with got bored, or we got into some stupid fight.
The earliest of these Minecraft servers were set up to imitate the "Mindcrack" Minecraft server which was popular on YouTube at the time. Regardless of motivation, these servers comprise my first experience hosting some sort of service for people on the internet.
The Beginning
In 2019, I obtained the first piece of hardware which is still used by EC today. I initially used it to run yet another Minecraft server (this time using MineOS) but shut it down after the players lost interest. After that, I was wanting for some sort of communication software and ran Rocket.Chat for a few weeks before deciding it was not fit for what I had in mind. I subsequently returned to old reliable (installing a Mumble server).
According to the server's filesystem, the first (and current, at the time of writing) Debian installation on the server took place on January 20th, 2020. The install started as "DietPi" (a distribution of "Armbian," which is itself a distribution of Debian). I have wrangled it into a vanilla Debian install over the years.
The Mumble is the start of what would eventually grow into EC (see The Mumble History), given that it is the first service that was hosted that continues to be hosted to this day. As per the Mumble history, a Mumble server was hosted intermittently since 2015, but "The Mumble" refers to the one running consistently since 2020.
At the end of the summer of 2020, I first made the Mumble server open to the public. I also began working on a website which I never finished and which was never hosted anywhere. All of this is still prior to the registration of the extremelycorporate.ca domain name. At the time, I was using the free No-IP dynamic DNS provider in order to have some sort of hostname to point at my server.
extremelycorporate.ca was registered on remembrance day 2020 following my discovery of a promotion by Web Hosting Canada wherein they offer registrants of a .ca domain a reduced price of $1 for the first year. This might sound like an endorsement, but WHC only offers domain management through an older version of cPanel which means doing any sort of automation (such as dynamic DNS) becomes a painful exercise requiring tools such as this script.
EC's development sped up from late 2020 until early 2021. This Wiki, CyTube, Transpo, Gitea and The XMPP Server were all launched during these months.
Eras
In this section, we chronicle our history in terms of the various eras it comprises.
Era 1 (Summer 2020 until December 2021)
This era encompasses "The Beginning" as described above. The construction of The Brick marks the end of this era. This era is characterized by the fast pace with which things were cobbled together.
Era 2 (Winter 2021 until Fall 2022)
During this era, various enhancements to existing services were implemented. Transpo 2 and Icejar were both launched during this time. There was a focus on extending what we already had in order to support the set of features we want.
Era 3 (Fall 2022 to present)
This era has seen less obvious milestones and instead comprises mostly """behind the scenes""" operations like nailing down our firewall and sorting out our dynamic DNS and certificate renewal situations. This era is the longest to date and contains many other similar advancements that Definitely Happened but which I'm too lazy to list out because they're sort of boring. Nevertheless, these are things that should be done and will benefit us going forwards.
You can call this the "polishing era" or the "boring era" depending on how charitable you want to be.