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**Adam Stacoviak:** So this fork from back in the day, Thanksgiving 2014 - it's been a while since then, so we just asked... Thanksgiving 2016 it's been basically two years - give us the overview of what's happened in the last two years, in terms of not just the io to Node and also the Foundation, but to the community.... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I mean, that was some work that we kind of started in the io.js days. I think we had this evangelism working group, we had a website working group, and when we merged in, a lot of that stuff came with us. And a lot of those ideas came with us, especially around "If you value different types o... |
I think that the main thing that's happened between then and now is that it went from a proof of concept to our actual sustainability strategy. The reason that the project was able to stay up and get more stable over time is because of these policies. We're not testing them out, this isn't proving ground anymore. |
The person who runs the CTC meetings now, the meetings that are kind of about making top-level core decisions - he primarily works on tests, something that we hardly ever got contributions in before. And just starting to value it, having the same kind of technical achievement ladder for other kinds of contributions... ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Who is this person? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's Rich Trott. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And also, we've seen a huge growth in overall contributors, but also when you look at the top five contributors, they're not the same people as they were two years ago, which is great. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So we're not depending upon the same people, we're not burning them out. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Exactly. I mean, one of them is the same, I think. A couple of them are the same. But also, the overall share of the codebase is a lot of those five contributors is going down. It's now I think below 50%. So we're getting much broader in terms of... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you measure this stuff? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, GitHub is actually really good for measuring this stuff. The fact that we do everything on GitHub means that we can get a lot of these kinds of metrics out. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm just trying to think about the GitHub interface - is it pretty easy who has -- I mean, you can see easily who's contributing and how many commits they've had, but does it say percentages and stuff like that? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** GitHub has very good data when you're looking at recent activity and when you're looking at top line activity. You really need to dig into the API to get at some of these metrics... In particular, one of the things that we really like to look at is which contributors that are brand new contributors h... |
\[07:54\] We onboard a lot of new committers all the time, so we need to be looking at what are the last month or three months of contributions from people that don't have a commit yet, like what does that look like and who is that list, so that we can prioritize who to onboard. |
We're approaching a hundred committers in core now... It's crazy. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a lot. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a lot of people, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How does that contrast to other platforms similar to Node? Have you done any comparisons to other -- in a language like Swift, or anything else... Even Rails, I suppose, or Phoenix and Elixir, since we're fans of Phoenix and Elixir. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, a lot of these platforms are in very different situations. A lot of them still have BDFLs, a lot of them are either entirely propped up by one company or have three companies keeping them afloat. We're really trying to measure ourselves against our own ecosystem, in a way. We're never going to ... |
We also look at "Are we doing better than we used to do? Are we slowing down in terms of onboarding new committers, are we still bringing in new people?" We try to measure against that more than we try to measure against other languages, just because there's so many differences between the communities. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So in a quick form, give me a recap on these last two years, so we can answer that quick and move on to a deeper topic. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We've quadrupled in size in terms of our user community. There were 1.2 million using Node around the time that we did the io.js fork, and today it's 5.7 million. It's a hundred percent year-on-year growth; it's crazy. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that Node, or is that JavaScript, or is it both? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's Node.js. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I know it's Node.js, but do you think that's because of JavaScript itself, or is it the attraction to Node? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** JavaScript itself, if you count the whole web, it's hard to find comparisons. You start to arrive at numbers that are far greater than the number of programmers. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** But we've done a lot to broaden our view of what our community is. We don't think of Node as just the server-side thing. There's a lot of people doing great IoT stuff with it. There's an entire new genre of frontend frameworks like React that are built as Node.js toolchains. Those are our users, that... |
We have growth in all of these sectors, and we continue to see new sectors pop up, like desktop. Electron comes around and all of a sudden desktop is a thing. So we try to keep ourselves open and keep our view of our users really open as well. So yeah, that's just a lot of people using Node. It also means that in a giv... |
We have a lot of challenges in terms of continuing to keep things simple, keep things easy, keep a lot of educational materials out there. We really benefit from Node being something of an outgrowth of the web community, and there's a lot of values around keeping things simple, bringing in new people, teaching "non-pro... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** A lot of those are the values of the web and we've really taken those to heart. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So quadruple growth, merged, obviously... Created a foundation... Is this the second iteration of Node Interactive or is it the third? There was one in Europe, one in Austin... Is this the third one? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We've done two this year, so it's really the second year of conferences. I think next year we'll scale back again to one. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this part of the -- obviously it's the Linux Foundation and Node.js Foundation, so this is an extension of all the efforts that came from the last time we had you on the Changelog with the rise of io.js? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. This is a Linux Foundation conference. The Node Foundation pays for it and we contract the Linux Foundation to run it, essentially. But this entire thing is new, for sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:06\] It's a great conference. Great location, a lot of diversity efforts... I like the stickers that were out there, the college stickers, the offering of childcare... It's very inviting, inclusive, respectful... I don't know what better adjective to use. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, Node.js is a pretty nice community. It's definitely a more diverse community than others, especially certain sectors. You look at the Nodebots community, for instance, and it's really great and diverse. So we benefit from a lot of community support for that kind of stuff, but also now we benefi... |
That community conference - that's a lot of additional infrastructure to take on that we haven't necessarily built up a competency for yet. So that's been really great to see here, as well. Obviously, I started NodeConf, I went to a lot of community conferences over the years... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You have the shirt on too, by the way. Nice shirt. I dig it. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... Well, when you print them, they're essentially free, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. You probably have a closet full of them, so you're like, "Which one will I wear today?" |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A black one. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but one thing that we get here that you don't see at community conferences are the kinds of Node users that you don't see on Twitter, you don't see on GitHub... They are really behind the desk all day, writing Node. They are users, they are a community, we need to understand them in order to em... |
So it's been great to get, at this event, a big mix of the foundation bringing a lot of the core groups together, the core community, a lot of outreach from me and Tracy to get a lot of really big community people here, but also a lot of Node users that we just don't get a lot of access to that we can hear from. That's... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Tracy Hinds, right? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, Tracy Hinds. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We like to say last names, so that it's not inside our baseball. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, she's fantastic. |
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