Community - This week I attended the Airflow Summit - which happened to be in Seattle. Apache Airflow was incubated at Apache in 2016, coming out of a project at AirBnB open sourced in 2015. So, Airflow and Fineract entered the Apache foundation at roughly the same time with very different starting points and trajectories. Airflow is the leading open source workflow management and data orchestration engine.
The Summit held this week was three days of technical sessions with a few "high level" presentations about the overall architecture and use cases - including how to use it for LLMs. The 1,200 attendees came from a number of large enterprise providers like AWS and Google Cloud and a few companies that specialize in it. Despite the differences, I believe that there are important things to learn from their experience to date. One, "hackability as a feature"... while they would maybe say it differently, the ability to make the system work for a specific set of use cases at a company is key to getting widespread adoption. / while Fineract has some of this recently in the java class overwrite concept, it is not well understood and our goal of system modularity will really help with this. Two, having first AirBnB and then ING Bank involved early on established credibility and relevance in the industry. / Successful stories need to be shared and made public - we should brainstorm on how to make that happen. Three, many improvements were proposed by users who also provided Pull Requests, and the PRs were accepted by a small set of committers initially.... now grown into a community of 3,500 contributors, with roughly 70 committers and 35 PMC members. / Interesting that we have very similar numbers of Committers and PMC members although the number of active people in those categories at Fineract is much lower. Four, there is a small company with deep roots in the project who builds hosted solutions on top of the OSS for a fee, and which is also a major contributor upstream via its devs. / This is a key thing and Fineract has it maybe the beginnings of this with vendors working on some upstream work styles. Thanks, James
