For those of you who have been following Appwrite, you might have noticed how much we value open source and the community that keeps it going. Appwrite has been a part of that community since 2019. However, the team has been contributing to open source long before Appwrite became an entity. If one thing in life is certain, it is that Appwrite is open-source.
What does open source mean to Appwrite?
What does it actually mean to be open source as a company? It means that our code is open for other developers to use, copy, and fork, but most importantly, to contribute to. It's about being transparent and about building in the open; it is about giving back to those who helped us get here. Most of Appwrite’s engineers were community members before they joined. To us, this embodies an important mindset that instates open source into the core of Appwrite. It is the foundation we build on and will always be at the heart of everything we do. With over 800+ contributors contributing to Appwrite, it's fair enough to say that the Appwrite you see today was built by you, the open-source community. Our latest release, Appwrite 1.5, was no exception to the same
Introducing Appwrite 1.5
If you haven’t yet heard, Appwrite recently announced the release of version 1.5, which has brought with it numerous features and upgrades, starting with Appwrite Messaging, our new offering to simplify implementing communication and messaging services in your applications. We have also released support for Server-Side Rendering frameworks in our SDK, allowing a substantial amount of web developers in our community to build with a lot more ease. Additionally, we have introduced Two-Factor Authentication in our suite of authentication offerings to improve the security of your app’s users. We have also added support for Enums in our SDKs to improve the developer experience and added new Bun and Dart function runtimes to Appwrite Cloud, among other updates and changes.
You can learn more about the release by visiting the Init website.
Contributors’ highlight
All of our contributors are very special to us, for they make Appwrite what it is. With this release, we also wanted to highlight some contributors whose stories inspired us:
Bishwajeet has been an active contributor to the Appwrite community for the last 2+ years and was chosen among the inaugural batch of the Appwrite Heroes. One of the features he contributed to in Appwrite 1.5 was the addition of Enums in the Appwrite SDKs to simplify the experience of working with constants, such as the names of different providers.
Here’s how Bishwajeet felt about his experience contributing to Appwrite SDK Generator:
“I recently contributed to adding support for enums in the Appwrite repositories. The contributing guides helped me a lot in setting up Appwrite and the SDK Generator locally. It took me a while to get a hold of the codebase and understand where to add new changes. Jake helped me navigate the codebase a lot and pointed me to what to do and how to test it. Once the PR was up, I had multiple reviews involving Eldad, Jake, and Damodar. Everyone was supportive and helpful, and after a bunch of reviews, the PR was finally merged. I can proudly say that now I can code in multiple languages.”
Utkarsh is an undergraduate student pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology. In Appwrite 1.5, he took the opportunity to make his first-ever feature contribution to Appwrite, which happens to be a new OAuth adapter for Zoho.
Learn how Utkarsh felt about his experience proposing and contributing his first feature:
“Contributing to Appwrite's codebase was a great learning experience. The team's guidance on pull requests, OAuth Adapter tutorials, and Gitpod integration made development efficient.”
Ben Humphries is a member of Appwrite’s GitHub community and an active open-source developer. He helped solve a build timeout issue with Appwrite Functions for slower building runtimes like Swift.
Hear how Ben felt about his experience collaborating with his fellow Appwrite community members:
“Contributing to Appwrite has been a rewarding experience. The community’s support and collaboration have been exceptional, making it easy to share ideas and feel like part of the team. The highlight for me was playing a small part in making it easier to use Swift on the server side.”
Thanks to all the contributors
The latest version of Appwrite was built with the help of over 20 developers, truly showing off what building together can achieve and how the community comes together. We are sincerely grateful to our community members for their contributions:
@Ananya2001-an, who added paths-ignore in tests on GitHub Actions
@sourabpramanik, who helped fix table overflow in mobile view
@sourabpramanik, whohelped fix the console organization project count limit
@FreSauce, who fixed missing separator for keycodes comparison
@kunalvirk, who fixed duplicate message on document deletion
@FreSauce, who helped add the option to update hostname for flutter web apps
@2002Bishwajeet, who fixed enum type errors in Flutter and Dart
@2002Bishwajeet, who helped add support for enums generation from the OpenAPI spec
@iMacHumphries, who helped solve a build timeout issue with Appwrite Functions
@Souptik2001, who helped solve an issue with missing user activity logs
@GuptaPratik02, who updated multiple SDK Getting Started examples
Every single contributor and every single contribution made the product better for the next developer. That is what makes it all the more exciting, knowing that your PR actually has value for the next person.
How you can contribute
Appwrite is everything that it is because of the support of our community. Whether we look at our Discord community, GitHub contributors, or developers interacting with us on social media, everyone adds value and makes a difference. If you would like to increase your participation and play a more substantial role in the development of Appwrite, here are some ways you can make a difference:
Share your suggestions in the issues listed on our GitHub repo.
Make bug fixes and feature contributions by creating pull requests.
Raise feedback and new ideas about Appwrite in our GitHub Discussions.
Participate with other Appwrite developers in our Discord community.
Share your Appwrite project with our community on the Built With Appwrite platform.
Add any Appwrite-related educational content on our awesome-appwrite repo.
Together, let’s continue to build Appwrite through the power of open source, allowing every developer to have the capabilities of hundreds of developers through one platform.
