📓 webpack 2017: A Year in Review 📓
From all of us at webpack: 🎆🎉 Happy New Year! 🎉🎆
Leading up to 2017
One year for us, feels like 300 “JavaScript years”. JavaScript’s ease of use, accessibility, dynamic nature, and distribution platform enables us to witness a new tool, framework, or paradigm to pop up every week or so! We call this the “JavaScript Renaissance”.
To stay relevant and sustainable as a JavaScript open source project, you also have to be easy-to-use, accessible, and share many of the same qualities as JavaScript itself. So before we reflect on the incredible change we’ve seen in our project in 2017, we want to lay the foundation we built that helped make it possible:
- June 2, 2016: Core Team Introduced — Create roadmap (for v2), meeting notes, stand ups, call for maintainers, and the inaugural post for our official webpack publication on Medium. An official voice for our users finally exists
- July 9: Call for Help w/ Docs — We make the decision to completely rewrite our webpack documentation from the ground up and reach out to the community for help.
- Sept. 29: webpack-dev-server 2.0 — Also, we add our 5th Core Team member Kees Kluskens and see a revitalization in contributions to our
supporting webpack repos. - Oct. 10: New Doc’s Page Launched — We open the preview of our new documentation site and show people how they can help finish the remaining pieces.
- Oct. 15: webpack join’s Open Collective — We begin to explore what it means for “anyone to be paid to work on open source”.
- Oct. 17: webpack join’s JS Foundation — We start to think about our long-term goals and future.
- Dec. 14: webpack 2 RC is released — This is our New Years gift to our users in 2017. Prior to all this, there were many who believed webpack would
never reach v2 RC/Final. - Dec. 17: webpack on The Changelog — I jump on the mic with the cast of the Changelog and share our webpack story with the world.
A year in review: 2017
We release webpack v2 and our roadmap for the future, but it didn’t stop there. The day of our release, we reach
$15,000 in funding.
On top of this, here’s a quick list of things we announced from our publication. Theres so many things that happened so if we’ve missed anything, feel free to chime in!
- Jan. 19th: webpack-china announced
- Jan. 25th: webpack-contrib is created led by new Core team member Joshua Wiens. Aims to standardize and tend to our core loaders and plugins.
- Feb. 6th: GitLab Announces their switch to VueJs and webpack
- Mar. 20th: ag-grid becomes webpack’s first long-term major partner — to date, our partnership continues to be fruitful for ag-grid and they are webpack’s 2nd largest overall sponsor.
- Mar. 25th: The core team interacts with the community for triaging their builds
- Apr. 6th: We partner with our buddy Rich Harris on a piece on Rollup and Webpack and their harmony together.
- Apr. 7th: Tobias Koppers (original webpack author and maintainer) goes full time work on webpack powered by open source funding.
- Apr. 10th: We start our freelance logbook.
- May. 20th: Organized another team to focus on web
pack-cli - May. 30th: Webpack Contributor Guides Series is started. We place a premium emphasis on contributions and inclusion.
- Jun. 19th: We land webpack 3; webpack has over 90k in yearly funding on Open Collective
- Jul. 31st: webpack is awarded $125,000 to
implement WebAssembly as a first class module type. - Aug. 2: Trivago becomes webpack’s next major sponsor at $10,000/mo. This leads to a wave of funding from other companies in addition inspired by their investment.
- Sep. 3: Webpack 4 is materializing in the ‘next’ branch on GitHub, we start to inform people about the changes and features.
- Oct. 26: Webpack speaks at ReactiveConf EU. Showcases what’s to come for webpack 4.
- Dec. 14: webpack 4.0.0-alpha released
Time Flies
To the core team, it feels like, all of this happened yesterday though. We are excited to kick off this new year and can’t wait to share what next for webpack 4 and 5. 😍
Stay tuned as we have some exciting information to share with you soon!
No time to help contribute? Want to give back in other ways? Become a Backer or Sponsor to webpack by donating to our open collective. Open Collective not only helps support the Core Team, but also supports contributors who have spent significant time improving our organization on their free time! ❤
