Wow. 2017 Is finally drawing to a close. Part of me feels like this year has stretched on forever, and part of me feels like I was looking at a 2016 calendar just yesterday. No matter how it is you feel about things that have occurred in the world over the last year there’s at least one thing we can agree on: It was certainly dramatic and the same can be said for the Habitat project. Let’s take a few minutes to look at what 2017 held for Habitat and its community.
To start off, the sheer amount of code merged across the project is pretty incredible. We’ve had 5,976 commits across 2,411 Pull Requests from 142 Authors in just 2017! Those numbers are remarkable for a project that’s only a year and half old and they span all of the repositories for the project. Now, 1,719 of those PRs were against the Habitat core repo from 87 authors. Thats 87 people contributing to our Rust and Bash codebase with a core team of only 12 people. We also had 648 PRs against core plans from 101 authors. There are now 543 unique packages in the core origin (separate revisions not included) and 15,226 packages in core total.
If it’s not clear from the number of contributors and contributions in our first full year of public development, our community has also had some fantastic growth this year. The community Slack team is now home to 1,479 members of which over a third are actively engaged. Myself and the rest of the core team have been out on the road spreading the work we’re doing and it’s proof positive that the project is solving some serious pain for folks adopting containerized workloads. All in all, those metrics are excellent and they cover some wonderful, tangible, bits of data that point to some of the value and growth we’ve seen this year. But, they don’t cover everything.
Some of the best things to come out of the Habitat project in 2017 aren’t hard data points on lines of code written or number of butts in digital seats on Slack. The project’s governance has really begun to evolve and in many ways the Habitat team is pioneering process and procedure for operating a FOSS project at Chef. The Habitat team has done more work in a more transparent way this year than many of us thought possible. Our commitment to growing a healthy community has payed off in spades. We’ve elected three community advocates, we’ve defined and implemented an RFC process for Core-Plans, and we’ve held public issue triages at least once a week most weeks this year. We’re still demoing publicly, and our number of external maintainers has gone from zero to seven. Just think about that for a moment, Habitat has a core development team of 12 people, and 7 external maintainers. For year 1, thats pretty damn good.
All of these things are very exciting and they can help us gauge where we’ve been in the last year. But the most important thing for all of us to remember about 2017 is that without each member of this community, this project would be impossible. While outside of Habitat, across the world, things have been tumultuous each of you are daily contributing to an active and safe space for technologists of wildly different backgrounds to come together around a tool. To me, that is the most important part of Habitat in 2017. We managed to keep our community open, safe, friendly and helpful, and 2018 is only going to be better.
As always, thanks for using Habitat.