The Spin Project - A Community Snapshot
Ronan Flynn-Curran
spin
community
github
open source
Having recently switched to a open planning process, the Spin project has been seeing a steady stream of community engagement from contributors across the Cloud-Native and WebAssembly developer spheres.
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Measuring Activity
Insights into the growth and adoption of an open source project are mostly GitHub centric - we do not include any usage gathering data tooling inside Spin - to avoid any impact on performance - and to adhere to our belief that a developers’ tools shouldn’t track them.
Star
Stars are one such key metric - Spin recently celebrating crossing the 5k mark - but we also keep an eye on forks, PRs, and ‘Clownloads’ - which is our combined term for Clones and Downloads of Spin.
Snapshot of some Spin metrics as of 7/8/2024:
| Stars | 5038 |
|---|
| Forks | 242 |
| Commits | 3,448 |
| Clownloads | 180,645 |
| Releases | 41 |
| Contributors | 81 |
| Contributors (outside of Fermyon) | 54 |
| PR reviews that mention ‘nice’ | 143 |
It Takes a Village
Each PR review, each commit starts with a connection - developers connecting the right tool to the right problem, sharing solutions, and ultimately pushing fixes back upstream.
Internally at Fermyon, our team works hard to connect the dots where we can, to provide a great developer experience and to carefully nurture and support efforts in our open source projects and those in the ecosystems around us - as we’ve done in the past for many Kubernetes and Cloud-Native projects.
- Karen Chu has been driving our community strategy, running dozens of Fermyon events (both online and at conferences) to drive developer awareness around Spin and SpinKube. She has quite a legacy in open source - authoring books, working in project governance and is an active CNCF ambassador.
- Melissa Klein, Spin’s OSS Program Manager at Fermyon, has steered the roadmap and coordinated engineering efforts across over 40 product releases. Her background is focused in technical open source projects and streamlining development processes.
- Tim McCallum, a technical content specialist and Rust/Python enthusiast has been instrumental in shaping the Fermyon Documentation, shaping the developer flow through quick starts and guides - as well as much of the content you can find throughout our blog.
- Sohan Maheshwar has worked tirelessly to reach and scale our developer community - growing our audience through channels like YouTube, Discord and Dev.to as well as IRL at workshopes and meetups across Europe, in his work as Fermyon’s DevRel lead.
- Rajat Jindal has given presentations around India, as well as frequently answering users’ questions in Discord, the Spin issue queue, and elsewhere, in addition to being a part of the SpinKube team.
- Justin Pfleuger wrote many of the templates and examples for our Spin Up Hub, as well as detailed blog series that add color and depth as tutorials. You may also recognize Justin from his many conference appearances, as he’s been at the booth at KubeCon, various AI conferences, and more.
- Chris Matteson has been a fixture on the show floor and in the community space, showing up at conferences with demos and working hard to introduce Spin to new audiences. A big fan of meetups, Chris has visited many Wasm and Dev groups around the US as well.
- Wanting Lu has built a set of dashboards to help us ingest and track all the data points we’ve discussed above - such as GitHub, Crates.io, and Discord to help us get a better idea of how the Spin community learns about the tools.
All of these efforts would be nothing without the contributors themselves - Spin is shaped by the communities participation and interest in. the project. We’re indebted to the developers who show up and write code, file issues and share what they’re working on.
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Connecting with the Spin Community
Are you interested in getting involved? The Spin developer community gets together each Monday at 2:30pm UTC and 9:00pm UTC (alternating) on Zoom to discuss Spin issues, the open roadmap, and upcoming features.
Subscribe to the Google Calendar for meeting dates, and refer to the Spin Project Meeting agenda for meeting dates, the Zoom link, and topics of discussion for the day. Notes from the call are added to the agenda doc each week along with a link to the recording. If you have something you would like to demo or discuss at the project meeting, we encourage you to add it to the agenda.
In addition to GitHub, Fermyon’s team is active on Discord, Dev.to and YouTube.
Links: