Twenty Years and Counting
Twenty years ago this month, David Blevins and I started OpenEJB, the open source project which was the foundation of Apache TomEE. It was an exciting time for David and me as neither of us had a lot of experience in open source. I left the project in 2004, but David stuck with it, and for that I’m grateful. OpenEJB became a central part of TomEE several years ago, and it’s through TomEE that we continue to support open-source Jakarta EE.
Why TomEE for the Holidays?
We want everyone to experience the kind of joy and satisfaction that we derived from our work in open source, so for the next two months, Tomitribe is running its second annual, “TomEE for the Holidays,” a concerted effort to bring new contributors into the project.
As David explains in this post announcing the initiative, he had noticed that activity shot up every year during the Holidays enabling enormous advancements for Open Source ecosystems. Tomitribe decided last year to make the Holiday Season extremely special by inviting anyone who has not yet contributed to TomEE or open-source but would like to start, to join our community and make a difference. The result was nothing short of amazing.
TomEE for the Holidays: An Enormous Success!
From December 2018 through February 2019 (just three months), the TomEE community welcomed 44 new contributors who made over 178 commits in that period alone. One hundred ninety-five new Pull Requests created, and 161 closed during that period. With a total of old and new contributors, we had 49 active members making 553 commits during the very first TomEE for the Holidays!
It was, without a doubt, the best three months in the project’s history in terms of expanding our community. We had Contributors joining with experience in open source and many who had none. In the past year, TomEE had 64 of its 95 members (accumulated over 20 years) make contributions – that’s two-thirds of the community contributing in just the last year alone!
We Celebrate You, the Contributor
Why was last year’s campaign so successful? Because we celebrated every time, a new Contributor joined. We sent out tweets like the one below, each one unique, each one thanking the new Contributor. It’s the Apache way, “Community over code.”
We also focus on making every new Contributor feel welcomed and provide support to our members throughout the year. People ask questions and get answers. There are no dumb questions – we know its hard to get started on a new project, let alone open source for the first time, and we want to help our members succeed and flourish.
We are Global
The TomEE community is broad with contributions from all over the World, including the United States, England, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and New Zealand to list a few. In fact, we often invite new contributors to write translations of our documentation. So no matter where you are in the World, you will be welcomed.
How to Get Started
If you want to join an open-source community, now is the time to do it! All we ask is that you subscribe to the [email protected] mailing list and send one email asking one simple question, “How can I help?” You can expect to receive a warm welcome and some tips for getting started. For more details on getting started, read this blog post.
Welcome, one and all!
