It’s official: the Meltano Slack community has reached 1000 members! This is a huge milestone for the community and shows us the excitement around open-source Data Integration and DataOps.
In May of 2020, Douwe’s blog post about how Meltano was pivoting to focus on open source data integration went live. There were about 250 people in the Slack group at that time. Since then, we’ve seen continuous growth in the community. Within Slack, we’ve seen well over a third of users are active on a weekly basis, surpassing the original Singer Slack space. We’ve also seen big growth in the usage of Meltano: by our latest estimate we have seen over 12000 projects created in the past 12 months of which 25% were used within the last month! And this is just the projects we know about since users can easily disable usage statistics.
Since January, we’ve seen even faster growth in usage and community activity as the investment in Meltano and Singer has grown. AJ and myself officially joined the team, we launched the Singer SDK, created a simplified interpretation of the Singer spec, and we announced our larger roadmap and vision, including the development of the upcoming SingerHub. On the community side, we started hosting weekly Office Hours and fortnightly Demo Days, which have been a lot of fun for everyone involved (recordings available on our YouTube channel). To keep up this fantastic energy and growth, we’re looking to hire more people soon in development and community roles (Interested? Reach out to Douwe on Slack!)
The SDK in particular has been very well received in the community with the launch being featured in Tristan Handy’s Data Science Roundup and an upcoming episode on the Data Engineering Podcast (stay tuned for more details and check out our previous episode!). More importantly, though, we’re hearing from the community that it’s been incredibly easy to build high quality taps. My favorite quote is from Stephen Bailey:
The SDK was able to trim my tap code down by about 70% from when I wrote it previously. This is everything I’ve wanted from Singer from the start.
This is a fantastic endorsement and a testament to AJ’s and the community’s hard work and collaboration.
We’re incredibly grateful for the support the Meltano and larger Singer community have shown us. We believe strongly in the potential of Singer and the open source DataOps ecosystem and we’re committed to helping it become what it should be. There is a lot of work still to do and we hope to grow the community and project as more data professionals understand the power of open source for data integration and DataOps.
We’d love for you to join us and help build this project and community! Collaborate with us on issues, in Slack, and on Twitter!