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  • My 2019 Year in Review with Flarum

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!

Continue on a personal twitter thread:

  • [deleted]

@luceos great post. You probably noticed that I, like others, have a much more visible presence on discuss these days, and immediately step forward to offer assistance. The community is the core of flarum, and without it, the momentum and drive to improve the level of support the community requires just wouldn't be there.

I'm also active in Discord for those looking to hunt me down 🙂

Donating on a monthly basis is the least anyone can do to support such a great project. My flarum instance is gaining traction, and is used pretty much all across the globe these days - this wouldn't be possible without the time, effort, blood, sweat, tears, cursing, and everything else required to make this project a success.

Here's what a year of work looks like for me. These are returning visitors 🙂

I frequently post here with new updates and cool things that I discover to make flarum more dynamic - mostly in the form of a bot that posts news feeds for me via the API.

I'm more than happy to help make this community even better. Bring on 2020 !

    A huge thank you to you @luceos for taking the lead on Flarum when Toby left. And even more for ensuring the continued success fo Flarum. I also have to thank you for inviting me to join the Flarum team as a Trainee (still a beta test thing), although what I've done is tiny in comparison to all the work already done I've already learned a massive amount not just on good code but also on team collaboration.

    Also I see [deleted] that you are also a man of culture and have chosen Matmo for Analytics 😃

      [deleted] You probably noticed that I, like others, have a much more visible presence on discuss these days, and immediately step forward to offer assistance.

      I'm very proud to see people like yourself become a key figure by helping others to this extend, it reduces the overhead on the core team.

      And all financial support is much appreciated, it brings us a step closer to a professional organization.

      Hong Kong ’s circle is very dark, maybe because many people in mainland China are using VPN. 😆

      I'd like to echo what tankerkiller125 said!

      I'm so proud to be part of such a forward-thinking and devoted team. Thank you for picking up where Toby left off, and for shaping Flarum into what it is today @luceos - What you have done for the team, and furthermore for the project is second to none, and we owe a large portion of the continued success to people like yourself.

      I look forward to what 2020 brings, and continuing to work with the future of Forum software.

      6 months later
      luceos changed the title to My 2019 Year in Review with Flarum .