Birthday Week: Gratitude
This week we’re celebrating the 1 year anniversary of our incorporation; each day we’re celebrating something, culminating with having a PostGraphile stall at FOSDEM in Brussels on Saturday and Sunday — do swing by if you’re in the area!
I love hearing from PostGraphile users about how they use the software, especially when I hear stories like how PostGraphile enabled two developers to do a better job in three months than 8 developers did in a year. Just yesterday, user ‘@envoked’ popped into our Discord chat:
I’ve been using PostGraphile to prototype a GraphQL backend at my company and I’m super impressed. It brings me the same level of joy I had when I first discovered Rails/ActiveRecord 10+ years ago. Thanks Benjie and team.
This kind of feedback is only possible because we have been able to spend significant time on PostGraphile throughout the last year. Back in January 2018, we set up a Patreon sponsorship page and began asking for contributions towards our time working on the project. By September, we passed the $1000 /mo mark and with this growing support we’ve been able to devote more and more of our time to PostGraphile.
Among other things, Patreon support has enabled us to -
- Massively increase PostGraphile performance
- Implement the powerful Smart Comments system for customising your GraphQL schema
- Make PostGraphile smarter about PostgreSQL extensions, permissions and indexes
- Implement `graphile-utils` — a module that makes it much easier to customise your schema
- Overhaul the error system, including adding helpful hints on how to fix many issues
- Enhance the plugin API to better support community plugin developers
- Overhaul and massively improve our TypeScript support
Besides these new features, Patreon support has also enabled us to work hard to improve PostGraphile’s documentation—we’ve even received a lot of compliments on it recently! Of course, there’s always more to do, and along with the new learning resources at learn.graphile.org (see Tuesday’s post) we’re going to be having a special focus on documentation and examples over the coming months.
We want to take this opportunity to say a huge “thank you!” to everyone who has donated any amount to our Patreon over the past year.
Since December 2017, Patreon supporters on the “Sponsor” tier or above have been listed inside the PostGraphile project in a “SPONSORS.md” file. Back in November, we updated the PostGraphile command’s greeting message to feature a random sponsor.
Today, as part of our ongoing website overhaul, we are happy to announce we are now featuring sponsors on our website. PostGraphile is a community effort, so we are pleased to underline this on our website.
We also want to extend our sincere thanks to all our GitHub contributors over the lifetime of the project. All code and documentation contributions, no matter how large or small, whether you’re a seasoned open source contributor or this is your first pull request, are all welcomed.
If you would like to get involved with contributions, pop into our Discord chat and get to know our community. We are also building a thriving community of plugin authors and would love more people to come and join us to help make PostGraphile even more awesome.
If you’d like to support our work and enable us to spend more time working on PostGraphile, please visit our Patreon page at patreon.com/benjie
Join us again tomorrow for our last post in this Birthday series, a look at what’s to come…
