WeatherOps Commander is turning three this year, and those have been some busy years! We have added features to meet the needs of many different industries. Our product has been a part of concerts, offshore and onshore drilling, the World Series, and many other businesses and events. Also, we've learned a lot about the product and our customers.

Commander has been successful, so why would we want to go and make sweeping changes for v4?

• Pivots between development cycles has led to an overall lack of planning
• The original codebase’s framework is Angular. We were not comfortable with the direction of Angular 2 and decided to move to React
• The original database structure became very complicated leading to very complex queries. This increased load on our pages and servers.
• We have taken into account a multitude of notes, feedback, and usage statistics to find what areas needed the most focus.

It became apparent in the middle of last year that a new feature would present us with two choices:

1. Continue down the road of adding patches to the current codebase
2. Restructure the database and allow for growth in the product features

Going down the path of option one was a non-starter. Any new feature would take more time than necessary due to the complexity of the codebase. Eventually, all development for Commander would be to support the legacy features.

So the team spent an entire quarter going through user stories, researching different products, and reading  a lot.

Lessening the mouse clicks and keystrokes needed to perform primary tasks was the driving motivator when we wireframed the new design. We are looking to cut time spent on user and asset management and provide you with the content that you want and need to make critical decisions on the weather. In the future, we will add more weather content to Commander through Skywise data feeds to provide you with more situational awareness of your assets.

You will still receive all the same reports and alerts as normal. We have improved the performance of the Interactive Map and the response times on nearly all APIs. You should experience a noticeable improvement in performance of Commander.

While you may not recognize WeatherOps Commander, we will work with you in the coming weeks to prepare you for the release.