Leveling up the Airbyte Community with a Maintainer Program, a Content Hub & a Conference

April 4, 2022

5 min read

Summarize with AI:

We define Airbyte’s mission as community powered. So community has always been and will always be top of mind for us. With that, we have a few updates we hope will benefit this community. But first, let’s look at our progress.

More than 1,000 daily active users

A chart that we track everyday and that we haven’t communicated about is our daily active users (DAUs), meaning users who sync data multiple times a day. It took us 18 months to get to our first 1,000 DAUs.

As a reference point, it took dbt - we’re huge fans! - about two and half years to get to their first 1,000 weekly active users. This type of growth is what gets us going every morning, it encourages us to make our product better for this growing community. That said, solving for data movement won’t be easy. We’re still early in this journey, and we won’t be able to do it alone. That’s why we have the goal to build the biggest and most active data engineering community in the world.

More than 6,000 data professionals on Slack and GitHub

Some other charts we keep track of are community growth on GitHub and Slack.

We especially pay attention to our code contributor charts. We even have a page dedicated to our contributors on the website. The fact that this growth has been entirely organic without much dedicated effort on our end is very humbling to us. We wouldn’t be able to have the ambitious vision we have today without our community.

In the next few months, we will work hard on making the contribution experience simpler and more engaging, and providing great discussions and content to our community.

Let’s see what we have in store.

Our first official maintainers and our new bounty system

In order to commoditize data integration, the biggest problem we need to fix as a community is how we maintain connectors at scale. In the past few weeks, we’ve set up a private beta bounty system to financially reward code contributors to help us bring our connectors’ quality to the next level.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we will be expanding that bounty system to the public very soon. You can learn all the details about it in this article, and can sign up on the waitlist to join as a participating contributor here.

We’ve also started to have official maintainers from the community with commit access. These are great contributors who have shown us again and again that they have the same ambitions for Airbyte: to bring reliability and quality to thousands of connectors in the quarters to come, and to fully solve the data movement problem.

So we’d like to present you our first amazing official maintainers:

We will have more and more maintainers with time. This is just the beginning of a new journey for the Airbyte repository!

Our data engineering content hub - Data Bytes

In addition to commoditizing data integration, our mission is to elevate the data engineering function with great insightful and educational content for the whole community of data engineers and want-to-be data engineers. That’s why we’ve grown our developer content team from one content strategist to four data engineers who will be creating content, from thought leadership to technical tutorials for our community.

Our goal will be to have fresh high-quality content for you every day. Our ambitions are for the content hub to become your go-to place for anything related to data engineering. So don’t hesitate to share with the team what you would like to see more content about. The team is still being onboarded, so it’s going to take a bit of time before we reach that goal. You can discover our new content hub here.

We call it a content hub, because it will not only host our articles and tutorials but also our videos, streams and podcast episodes. Yes, you read that right. We will soon start a podcast show, where we’ll invite both data engineering thought leaders and practitioners on a weekly basis. And we’re investing more and more in our Youtube and Twitch channels.

Our data engineering conference - move(data)

You might know Chris Rose as the organizer of the Modern Data Stack conference. Chris joined us as our head of events. In addition to helping Airbyte be present in most conferences this year, Chris has been working on our first conference, move(data) planned for November 8–10, 2022.

We will cover all topics across data engineering, including data orchestration, ingestion, warehousing, transformation, activation, quality, and more.

Start submitting your CFPs here, and, of course, make sure to sign up!

Bringing magic with a new approach to Slack and Discourse

Since we started working on Airbyte in July 2020, we’ve mostly provided technical support to our open-source community through our Slack. After having grown the Slack community to more than 6,000 data professionals, we have come to understand that Slack could be better leveraged differently. We are making two significant changes:

1. Moving all our support channels from Slack to Discourse. This will enable our community members to search similar issues posted and self-resolve their troubleshooting issues, or upvote feedback requests.

2. We’ve seen that our community has been exchanging tips and best practices, so we’re introducing a few new thematic channels, such as #advice-data-orchestration, #advice-data-architecture and more #advice-[topic] ones. Slack is therefore becoming more a community-oriented space where data professionals help each other.

You can learn more about how we intend to bring magic to our community with our new forum and Slack strategy in this article.

There’s more to come

This post just shares a few of the steps on part of a bigger journey to making the Airbyte community as magical as possible. We’ve grown our community 4x this quarter, it has now become our 2nd biggest team in the company. Expect to hear more on this front! And if you’re interested in having a say on the future of our data engineering community, let us know in the #community-strategy channel in Slack!

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