100% Committed to Open Source, YugabyteDB Community Update — June 11, 2020
By: Karthik Ranganathan
Tags: Database, Open Source, Software Development, Sql, Hiring

While it is still early days, it is exciting to see the YugabyteDB community hit some cool milestones! We wanted to share them with you, plus update you some additional community related news.

Our Commitment to Social Justice

First things first. Recent events that resulted in the death of George Floyd at the hands of police have been traumatic and painful for many of us, nationally and globally. It’s clear there is an overwhelming need for racial justice, equality, and the end to violence. At Yugabyte, we believe in equality for all; we do and will remain forever true to this pledge.

Our Commitment to Keeping Our Employees, Community, and Customers Safe

COVID-19 is having a devastating effect on people and communities around the globe. Health and safety remain a top priority for us. As such, we have been and will be conducting all business virtually until it is safe otherwise; this applies to all employee, community, and customer interactions, as well as Yugabyte job interviews, so we can all continue doing our part with social distancing and containment efforts.

Our Commitment to Open Source

YugabyteDB doesn’t pay lip service to open source like other Distributed SQL projects. We don’t trick you into downloading software that has time-bombed enterprise features that you can “try,” but ultimately have to “buy”. Advanced features like read replicas, encryption, distributed backups, change data capture, and multi-master async replication are all available under the Apache 2.0 license, not a fake open source license like Business Source License. To learn more about our commitment to open source, check out, “Why we changed YugabyteDB licensing to 100% open source”.

4,000+ GitHub stars

We recently crossed the “4000 GitHub stars” milestone on our GitHub repo! A huge thanks to everyone in the Yugabyte community who continue to encourage us onward with constructive feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. If you dig YugabyteDB, it’s simple to show us some love, just add your name to the Stargazers board here.

100+ open source contributors

We recently crossed the “100 contributors” milestone on GitHub and, as of this writing, now have 102 individual contributors who have helped make the core database software more functional, faster, and more reliable. We’d like to take a moment to highlight three recent contributions.

Are you ready to make a contribution? Check out our contributors documentation on how to get started.

It’s worth noting that the first couple of these contributions came from students who were inspired to contribute after sitting in on a virtual guest lecture I gave about Extending PostgreSQL to a Google Spanner Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. We’ve also recently given deep dive tech talks at Twitter and Pinterest.

If your engineering team wants to get a better understanding of YugabyteDB’s architecture, PostgreSQL-compatibility, resilience characteristics, plus guidance on how to perform benchmarks, drop us a line to set up a tech talk at your company. These FREE virtual sessions are normally an hour long, delivered over Zoom and tailored to your areas of interest.

1150+ community Slack members

We know that development teams working on fast moving projects with tight timelines need to get answers to their questions quickly from the folks who are actively developing YugabyteDB. They also want to exchange learnings with experienced community members who have “been there and done that.”

YugabyteDB’s Slack channel is the community’s “center of gravity” on the Internet for helping make everyone’s project a success. You can join the conversation here, our community is standing by!

Our Commitment to Giving Back

Community-powered charitable giving

With the unprecedented circumstances facing our global community, we looked for even more ways to contribute. Now that events and meetups are virtual for the foreseeable future, in lieu of our in-person events budget-including food, drinks, and swag-we’re donating those funds to charity. At the end of our virtual events, we ask attendees to vote for their favorite charity, and then we make a donation on their behalf. For example, after the recent PostgreSQL virtual meetup, we made our first donation of $200 to No Kid Hungry to help feed children who are missing meals due to school closures.

Our Commitment to Creating Opportunities

We are hiring!

We know that there are people out there looking for work, and we are grateful to have some open positions. If you share our beliefs on equality for all, and want to help us on our journey to becoming the default database for the cloud, check out our open positions, including roles such as Developer Advocates, Customer Success Engineers, and more.

Our Commitment to Rewarding the Community

Announcing the YugabyteDB Community Heroes program

We are excited to announce our newest community program — Community Heroes! By now we hope you can tell that community is core to what we do at Yugabyte. We are excited to launch the YugabyteDB Community Heroes program to recognize and reward rockstar community members for their amazing contributions and achievements. We work alongside you in Slack, in the Forums, in GitHub, and are inspired by and grateful for your contributions.

YugabyteDB Contributors — Community members who help us improve YugabyteDB through code, documentation, or helping others.

YugabyteDB Heroes — Experienced contributors who consistently make high-quality contributions and champion YugabyteDB within other communities.

YugabyteDB Super Heroes — Community leaders who take the YugabyteDB community to the next level in their local area.

The engineering, community, and marketing teams at YugabyteDB are on the constant look out for community members to nominate for a reward, so now is a great time to get involved!

Installing YugabyteDB has its rewards

In less than a year, we have mailed over 500 limited edition t-shirts destined to over 55 countries to sharp-eyed developers who have spotted the easter egg hidden in plain sight in the YugabyteDB admin UI. Want a reward for yourself? It’s simple, just install YugabyteDB on the platform of your choice and have a look around.

Our Commitment to Supporting Open Source Communities

YugabyteDB integrates with your favorite open source projects

When open source matters, it is important that YugabyteDB plays nice with your favorite open source projects and tools. Every month we announce several open source integrations, so this list is not comprehensive, but should give you an idea of the sorts of projects that integrate with YugabyteDB that have been demonstrated in our Docs, blogs, and video library.

Community events

Whether it is a large event or a local Meetup, Yugabyte is committed to supporting the people and projects that make the YugabyteDB community and open source prosper. Join us at one of these upcoming events:

You can find all of our events here. Want to invite us to speak at a future conference or Meetup? Contact us.