As you are all aware now, the world has recently experienced significant tremors due to the emergence of the Coronavirus. We wanted to give you an update about the measures we’ve taken to keep an optimal workflow, what this crisis changed for us so far, and what we planned for the upcoming weeks.

Team Organization

Here at Ultra, the past few weeks have been very active ones regarding talent recruitment. Our team is now composed of 60 highly skilled members, with approximately three-quarters of them being engineers and developers focused on building Ultra’s software stack.

We are following the evolution of the epidemic very closely and, in order to guarantee the health security of our in-house team, we decided to temporarily close our Parisian office and are providing hardware for anyone needing it to maintain their workflow from home during the quarantine.

Fortunately for Ultra, half of our team was already working remotely before the outbreak and we communicate constantly on Slack and conference calls, so adapting our practice for sanitary precautions has been a very straight forward and impactless process.

Rami James recently published an article detailing how we organize our work remotely and the daily tools we use to keep a high level of cohesion and performance within our teams. If you haven’t read it yet, read about our Technologies and Methodologies.

The health and safety of our team members are both very important to us and to ensure an optimal work pace, we make sure that everyone can go through this unusual period with as much confidence as before.

Regarding the financial health of our project, we are fortunate to be in an industry that is relatively sheltered from the crisis. The demand for media and entertainment has sharply increased since the start of quarantine measures in the West. We will all come out stronger from this ordeal, gamers unite!

Events

Due to the Coronavirus outbreak and the precaution measures that have been taken by events organizers and the various companies involved, all the major events we initially planned to attend have been canceled or postponed. However, we maintained our most important meetings by converting them to online calls and continue to meet developers this way on a regular basis.

Community Content

Not so surprisingly, gaming and content creation are blooming as people around the world progressively confine themselves at home. While gaming servers are straining from increased affluence, our amazing community is still very active. Among the great community content produced recently (and all available on Reddit), hats off to Michael (CryptoMick) who gave a lot of love to a series of articles about Ultra. You can access all four parts below.