First of all, I would like to wish everyone in the GitLab Community a Happy New Year! There's been an impressive growth in the wider GitLab community in 2019 and I wanted to share and celebrate what we all accomplished.
The first chart below shows merged MRs from the wider community beginning with the 11.0 release. We obviously have a nice trendline, but we also had a record number of merged MRs for the 12.6 release (nearly 250!) and this was a great way to close out 2019!
I also want to show some numbers on the wider community growth over the past 3 years. As you will see in the chart below, the number of contributors almost doubled between 2018 and 2019 as we had almost 900 contributors with merged MRs last year. In terms of the number of merged MRs, we had 2400+ MRs in 2019 which is more than 30% increase from the previous year. I really need to congratulate and thank everyone in the wider community for your contributions as these numbers clearly show that GitLab is a thriving open source community. Beyond MRs or code, we appreciate your insight and perspective from your contributions.
I also updated the top contributors page with the final numbers from 2019. The number of regular contributors with 5 or more merged MRs during the year also saw a significant increase from 2018 (35) to 2019 (68). The growth in regular contributors is something we tried to focus on last year, and I'm impressed with the result. Congratulations to everyone who made the list, and your GitLab souvenir will be coming to you soon.
Let's meet at FOSDEM
Now I want to switch gears to what's happening at FOSDEM on February 1st and 2nd. Last year, GitLab had a stand at FOSDEM for the first time and we were overwhelemed with the amount of people who came to talk to us. I'm excited to announce that we will be back with a stand at FOSDEM and look forward to meeting with community members. Our stand will be at Building K/Level 1 and this page will help you find where the GitLab stand is.
We will also have a meetup session on Sunday as a part of a Birds of a Feather (BOF) track on Sunday (February 2nd) morning between 10:00 - 11:00 in room J.1.106. You can find details on the meetup at this FOSDEM page.
In addition, a couple of GitLab team members are giving talks in devrooms. Alessio Caiazza will discuss building a smart reverse proxy in Go and I will have the opportunity to discuss why community matters in corporate open source projects.
Finally, we are working on organizing a Happy Hour on Saturday (February 1st) evening, so stay tuned for more news on this! I hope to see many of you at FOSDEM, and I'll try to make frequent announcements/posts on Twitter during the conference.
