Hi everyone -- Apache Beam was established as a top-level project a year ago (on December 21, to be exact). This first anniversary is a great opportunity for us to look back at the past year, celebrate its successes, learn from any mistakes we have made, and plan for the next 1+ years.
I’d like to invite everyone in the community, particularly users and observers on this mailing list, to participate in this discussion. Apache Beam is your project and I, for one, would much appreciate your candid thoughts and comments. Just as some other projects do, I’d like to make this “state of the project” discussion an annual tradition in this community. In terms of successes, the availability of the first stable release, version 2.0.0, was the biggest and most important milestone last year. Additionally, we have expanded the project’s breadth with new components, including several new runners, SDKs, and DSLs, and interconnected a large number of storage/messaging systems with new Beam IOs. In terms of community growth, crossing 200 lifetime individual contributors and achieving 76 contributors to a single release were other highlights. We have doubled the number of committers, and invited a handful of new PMC members. Thanks to each and every one of you for making all of this possible in our first year. On the other hand, in such a young project as Beam, there are naturally many areas for improvement. This is the principal purpose of this thread (and any of its forks). To organize the separate discussions, I’d suggest to fork separate threads for different discussion areas: * Culture and governance (anything related to people and their behavior) * Community growth (what can we do to further grow a diverse and vibrant community) * Technical execution (anything related to releases, their frequency, website, infrastructure) * Feature roadmap for 2018 (what can we do to make the project more attractive to users, Beam 3.0, etc.). I know many passionate folks who particularly care about each of these areas, but let me call on some folks from the community to get things started: Ismael for culture, Gris for community, JB for technical execution, and Ben for feature roadmap. Perhaps we can use this thread to discuss project-wide vision. To seed that discussion, I’d start somewhat provocatively -- we aren’t doing so well on the diversity of users across runners, which is very important to the realization of the project’s vision. Would you agree, and would you be willing to make it the project’s #1 priority for the next 1-2 years? Thanks -- and please join us in what would hopefully be a productive and informative discussion that shapes the future of this project! Davor
