Summary

The provided content details the recent activities and financial status of the webpack project, including community engagement, performance improvements, and funding efforts.

Abstract

In the 12th week, the webpack team focused on knowledge dissemination at the enterJS conference and discussed v8 performance for future build performance enhancements. The team also addressed follow-up tasks post the webpack 3 release and welcomed an increase in community contributions. Week 13 highlighted the financial challenges faced by the webpack project, leading to a pause in development to ensure contributor payments, aiming to raise awareness about Open Source funding. Despite an annual budget of $100k, the project's sustainability remains a concern. In a positive turn, week 14 saw webpack being accepted for the Segment Open Fellowship, securing$ 24,000 for three months of development, and the team celebrated the first webpack meetup in Munich.

Opinions

The author values knowledge sharing, as evidenced by their presentation at enterJS and the publication of their talk slides.
There is a strong emphasis on community contributions and the importance of recognizing and compensating contributors fairly.
The author believes in the significance of Open Source Software (OSS) funding and is actively seeking sustainable financial models for webpack.
The acceptance into the Segment Open Fellowship is seen as a significant achievement and a step towards long-term sustainability for webpack.
The author is optimistic about the future of webpack, as indicated by the excitement surrounding the first Munich meetup and the anticipation of future gatherings, such as ReactiveConf.
There is an underlying concern about the financial health of the project, despite the current level of funding and recent sponsorships.

Conf, Meetup and Sponsorship (week 12–14)

2017/06/19–2017/07/09

Week 12

The first week I spend mostly on the enterJS, trying to spread knowledge on the internal workings of webpack. If you are interested you’ll find the slides here. The talk was also recorded, but it was in German and it’ll take a while until it’s published.

I had some interesting discussions with Benedikt Meurer about v8 performance, which is great considering Build Performance is the next topic on the ToDo list.

The remaining time I spend with follow-ups of the webpack 3 release. Most of them not writing by me, but by contributors. I’m happy to see that the number of contributions is increasing.

There were also a bunch of really great performance PRs on enhanced-resolve by Mike Sherov, which should increase resolving performance a lot (depends on your application, but some reported -30% build time).

Week 13

webpack runs out-of-money…

… so I stopped working on webpack for a week to be able to pay out all contributors. I thought it’s not fair to work full-time on webpack, when this means other contributors cannot be payed.

The hidden agenda on this move was to increase the awareness of Open Source funding (and to gain some sponsors).

Open Source Software is not free. Somebody else payed for it.

Currently we have about $100k annually. This is really huge for a OSS which is not company-backed. But at the some time it’s really bad for a product…

Week 14

With the problem in mind that webpack is under-funded I applied to the Segment Open Fellowship 2017 a while ago. My goal was to improve webpack to attract more sponsors and make it long-term-sustainable.

And guess what, it was accepted by Segment. 🎉

So Segment sponsors the next 3 months of me working on webpack. This is a total of $24,000, which means they probably become the biggest sponsor after the 3 months (at least if nothing changes in between).

This also means I can work 3 additional months full-time on webpack. With savings from donations in these months maybe 4–5 months.

This week we also had the first webpack meetup in Munich, which was really fun. It was also recorded and you can watch it here:

I guess it was the first time 3 webpack core team members met at all:

Next time we meet on ReactiveConf with even more members…

< week 10–11 week 15 >

webpack is not backed by a big company, unlike many other big Open Source products. The development is funded by donations. Please consider donating if you depend on webpack… (Ask your boss!)

Special thanks to these sponsors: (Top 5)

ag-Grid (DataGrid) donated a total of $12,500
Capital One (Bank) donated a total of $12,000
AngularClass (Training) donated a total of $3,516
Google Angular (Framework) donated a total of $2,500
OpenCollective (OS funding) donated a total of $1,988
Full list