I'm no fan of these blog posts covering a year in review 🙊. But, I think it's a great moment to reflect on 2019 and glance over into the new year 🎇. This item might be more personal than the ones I wrote in the past, please bear with me.
January 1st marks a huge change in my professional career. @BartVB approached me last year to take a leap of faith. He wanted me to move his Equine community from phpBB to Flarum. The challenge of getting a 100 million posts 😱 forum into our ecosystem is extremely appealing 🤤. While clarifying what this employment looked like it was obvious that the goal was not just the migration, but also ensuring the existence and growth of Flarum itself 🤗.
The outlook to work on Flarum more than I already did was tempting, but it also felt like a risk. Every single year Flarum had battled against stagnating development efforts, extremely short motivational bursts and the inability to meet expectations. Things had to change, the team had to level up and regain focus on that stable release.
During the first quarter of the year, I advocated for Flarum to adopt a long-term strategy. This discussion gave our team a chance to evaluate their motives for working on Flarum, and our founding father, Toby, decided that his long-term strategy lay outside of Flarum. Our parting was bittersweet, losing our founder and the strength of his contributions was a huge blow, but all those who remained were reinvigorated by our shared commitment to see Flarum survive. And survive we did, I stepped up and brought the team together to gain renewed focus for the future. The staff, my brothers-in-arms held faith even through these dire times, nothing could have given me more strength than their ability to battle on with me.
Within weeks, we set up a foundation and began transferring the Intellectual Property from Toby. A process that was fully concluded only recently. This new foundation shares its ownership, not just informally, but also legally through its board members including @Franz and @jordanjay29 next to myself.
To battle my fears of inactivity, we settled on a fixed release cycle as soon as we could, while improving and reviewing all our process we had in place. Both beta 10 and 11 have been the result of this changed plan of attack. Our next release cycle will further see changes to our planning and development, I literally can't wait how we'll grow into an even better team next year.
One of the largest bottlenecks for continued development is time. We have been relying on time given voluntarily, something we are targeting to change in 2020 using community donations. These funds will be used to buy days from our core developers to focus completely on Flarum! Necessary preparations for this have been taking place the last few months.
My time investment to organize most of this, was freely and unconditionally made available during work hours by my employer. His devotion to grow Flarum, with money, time and advice has been fundamental to what Flarum is set out to be. I don't say this often enough, but those who support our project through money, time and advice, from the bottom of my heart, thank you!
With 2019 drawing to a close, our eyes are staring vividly, expectently at 2020. Because we are no longer uncertain about our future; we are closing in on the year that marks stable, the year that brings in paid development hours. Twenty twenty will prove to the world how fantastic Flarum is for communities of any size! I am glad that our community is part of this journey, because shoulder to shoulder we bring a damn fine online discussion platform to the table!
Enjoy the festivities, your loved ones and your communities these holidays everyone!
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