Taiga Blog

I am writing this post at 39.000 feet on my way back from London to Madrid. Yesterday was a great day for Taiga but most importantly, we had so much fun! So there is this thing called Agile Awards in the UK. It has been going on for 7-8 years now and the different categories acknowledge various aspects of the Agile movement. Projects, people, initiatives... and for the first time this year, they added the Best Agile Tool award.

We welcome Taiga 1.9, baptized Abies Siberica after this sturdy Siberian fir that can easily withstand 50 degrees below freezing. To this beautiful tree we owe essential oils used in perfume and aromatherapy.

Meat Lovers rejoice! The Taiga 1.8 Sarracenia Purpurea Release is aptly named after the carnivorous Northern Pitcher Plant, the famous bug-eating plant common to the Taiga in much of northern Canada. The Taiga development team has been as busy consuming bugs as a football field-sized patch of Pitcher Plants. But more importantly we have a star line up of features that will surely have you cheering with us.

For the past month we've been keeping our head down - just coding, coding and more coding. This release we name in honor of the Black Crowberry (Empetrum Nigrum). It's an edible berry- not massively popular as a food unless you live in the subarctic regions. It also appears to have some medicinal qualities. So we figured, if anyone has any,send them our way to help help heal our strained computer monitor-induced eye soreness. This release you get:

This release we pay tribute to our North American users by Christening our next release, with one of their native species, Abies Bifolia. Or as the less scientific amongst us would call it, “that Christmas tree in the corner.” These are the species that you will find yourself looking to avoid if you’re still planning to get in some last minute spring skiing in the Rocky Mountains. Not much else to remark about this beautiful fir, though wikipedia does have an interesting tidbit about some indian tribes who drank or washed in Abies Bifolia for purification or to make their hair grow. Food for thought for those of us with receding (or receded) hairlines.

We start off 2015 with the aptly named 1.5 Taiga release, Betula Pendula (which sounds very funny if you say it 5 times quickly.) Betula Pendula, more commonly known as the Silver Birch, has attributes that make it the perfect namesake for 1.5.0.

What better name to give this early Christmas release than Abies Veitchii, a tree native to the Japanese forests occasionally grown to become Christmas trees? Hey Taiga users in Japan, send us a picture of your Abies Veitchiis

Dryas Hookeriana is a member of the Rose family (a Rose by any other name….) Like Taiga's Madrid-based development team, it prefers a sunny to half-shady situation. Come to think of it who, other than some select politicians would prefer a half-shady situation?

Picea Obovata, a name you won't ever forget! Or, “P.O." as we call it internally, is of course the name of our newest software release, and the name of the Siberian Spruce that lives in the Taiga from The Urals all the way east to the Magadan Oblast (where, incidentally we don’t have any users, though we do have almost 2,000 in other parts of Russia.)

We start off our celebration of the Taiga (the real one and the software) by naming our first post-release changelog, the Alnus Maximowiczii release (v1.1.0 ). We celebrate this species of Taiga inhabitant, an Alder tree native to Japan, Korea and the Russian Far East, and we salute our 2,482 visitors from those countries