Happenings in the AP Neighborhood March. ‘22

Published in

Apache Pulsar Neighborhood

6 min readMar 7, 2022

Was this forwarded to you? Click here to get future copies of Happenings!

For this issue, another new milestone, a preview of the new website, 2 new committers, the community technical meetings, and new events. Plus our normal features of a Stack Overflow question and some monthly community stats.

Another New Milestone

In November, we passed 10k stars on Github, which was pretty amazing (currently at 10.5k), in January we passed 6k members on Slack (currently 6,224). And as March starts, we just passed 500 contributors on Github. The graph below can be found here.

As you can tell from the graph, the number of our neighbors who are contributing to GitHub continues to grow. In 2021, the ASF named us as #5 in contributions. Already in 2022, we have had over 700 contributions (over 55% more at the end of Feb 2021), from 125 unique neighbors (25% increase from 2021). But these numbers only capture about 10–20% of our neighbors. They miss all of the users, who have spoken at events, tweeted/retweeted messages, or simply just put Apache Pulsar as one of their skills on their LinkedIn page. Each of these things helps spread the word about Apache Pulsar. One of the simplest things that you can do to help grow the neighborhood, is to star the GitHub repo, tweet blog posts or like articles on LinkedIn.

New Website

Shhh… don’t tell anyone, but the new website beta release has been released.

A group of our neighbors has been working hard to improve the Apache Pulsar home page. The complete redesign of the site should be completed soon and will correspond with the upgrade of the documentation. Go here if you would like to catch a sneak peek of the new site and to see what is being discussed, visit the website channel of the Pulsar Slack workspace.

Community Technical Meetings

Did you know that there are Community Technical Meetings that happen every two weeks? During these times, items such as PIPs (Pulsar Improvement Proposals) and other technical items are discussed. Plus questions about the more technical aspects of Pulsar are asked. Many of the committers and contributors are present and give their answers/opinions in this informal setting. Everyone is welcome and if you just want to dial in and listen, that is welcome too!

A quick reminder, per ASF rules, no final decisions are made at these meetings. Final decisions must be made on the dev@ mailing list where they can be tracked and commented upon by the entire neighborhood. But as we all know, sometimes it is just nice to ask a question and get an answer in real time.

Neighbor Michael Marshall posted his notes to the mailing list and can be found here. If you would like to attend the meetings, they are on Tuesdays from 4:00–4:50 pm and Thursdays 8:30–9:30 am (Pacific Time). For more information and to subscribe to the calendar, please visit the Events page on the website.

New Committers

The PMC also announced the addition of two new committers, Aloys Zhang of Tencent and Li Li of StreamNative.

Aloys has made a number of contributions to the code base, making his first contribution in March of 2020. You can check out his GitHub page here.

Li Li has made the second most contributions over the last year and made his first contribution in May 2021. You can check out his GitHub page here.

Thank you to both Aloys and Li for all of your past work and contributions to the neighborhood and we look forward to your future contributions!

Upcoming events…

Some of our neighbors have a couple of great events coming up.

March 10: FLiPN stack for Cloud Data Lakes

March 22: Event Streaming with Apache Pulsar and Kotlin

March 30: Open Source Bristol (hybrid event)

Do you speak/understand Italian or just want to listen to native speakers talk about Pulsar? Then you are in luck. We have the recording of Enrico Olivelli giving an introduction to Pulsar talk to the Java User Group, Bolona. The link to the video might change in the future, but you can always find it by going to the neighborhood YouTube page (and hit subscribe to get the latest videos and reminders when we go live).

Would you and some colleagues like to set up a Neighborhood Meetup group or maybe you have someone who you would like to hear speak at a future meetup? Let us know and we can give you some help. Visit us at our Neighborhood Meetup page or our slack channel #meetup and ask questions.

Great questions from the Apache Pulsar Stack Overflow

As you know, we have a very active slack and Stack Overflow neighborhoods. You can ask questions at both locations and get answers quickly. Slack does have two big weaknesses. One, it is limited to the number of messages that can be saved at about 10k and we hit the limit about every three months. Two, it is not searchable by Google. Thus, when you put the error message that you received into Google, you won’t see that the question has already been answered once or twice on Slack. So to promote our great Stack Overflow channel, we thought that we would find a good question and include it here in Happenings.

Last month we pulled one from the archives, but for this month, we liked the newest one (well when this was published, it was the newest one.)

Question: How to consume only the latest message published from the topic and ignore all previously published message in Pulsar?

The question has some code examples and what the expected output from the author. Go and check it out and did you know the answer? Can you improve upon the answer?

Stats of the Month

We have talked a lot about stats above and here we will just pull some of the stats from Feb 2022. There were over 3k conversations across all of our channels from 288 unique neighbors. There were 320 contributions from 90 neighbors, with about one third of those from people making their first contribution!

#ApachePulsar is growing

We have seen #ApachePulsar appearing in some new places. We asked that Meetup add it as a tag that you can add to your events and they just created the tag. Also, we have see #ApachePulsar appear on Peloton, so if you are part of that community, add in #ApachePulsar and ride with others from the neighborhood. If you have seen #ApachePulsar somewhere new, please let us know.

Apache Pulsar in the News

Here are some blog posts that we have found from around the web. We think that they are good, but we might not have read them all. Let us know what you have written and we will share it. Post links on our blogs-articles channel on the Apache Pulsar Slack. Or to see more, plus presentations, go here.

Pulsar in Python on Pi for Sensors — DZone IoT

Using Apache Pulsar WebSockets for Real-Time Messaging in Front-End Applications

Multi-Tenancy Systems: Apache Pulsar vs. Kafka

Podcast of Neighbor Jowanza Joseph is interviewed about his new Pulsar book.

Generating Simulated Streaming Data