Thank you to all the new contributors - a short note on reviews

[jtdavis777]

Hello all,

I just wanted to take a quick moment to say THANK YOU to all of the new (and current!) contributors to the project. We have quite a few new faces (avatars? 😄 ) coming to this corner of the open source community and I am very thankful to everyone for picking up issues and submitting PRs.

I see all of you pinging me for feedback and approvals and I want you all to know that I am still active in this community as much as I can be, but I also wanted to take a moment to share the current status as I have seen it recently.

Currently, we only have a few active maintainers that cycle around regularly, and unfortunately almost no reliable access to the Googlers who own the project. What this realistically means is that I and others (who, as far as I am aware, are all both volunteers and specialists in their niche section of the repository) are going to be able to respond to smaller feature PRs and bugfixes much more readily than larger features, as they present much less risk to the program.

Currently Active Maintainers (maybe not exhaustive, but who I've seen recently)

• @dbaileychess - lead project maintainer, c++/c#/lua
• @mustiikhalil - swift
• @bjornharrtell - java/javascript/typescript
• @jtdavis777 (hey, that's me!) - c++/lua (some)/python
• @aardappel (flatbuffers creator) - c++/lobster/overall project context (generally only ping for big questions)

As you may notice, there are some large gaps in this list. Largely, the most activity I have seen lately are for C# and rust. We also have a number of bazel/CI related issues that I certainly don't have any expertise in.

What I would love to ask of all of you (hoping to tag most of the recent and excited contributors below) is that you lean on each other as much as me to peer review any pull requests in languages you support, and lean on myself and others for guidance in keeping with repository and language consistency. I LOVE to see everyone coming together in this community and working to keep this an amazing resource for everyone.

Again, THANK YOU ALL :D and I hope to get to all of your issues and pull requests as soon as I can!

• Justin

NOTE I am expecting to have quite a bit more time over the next two weeks to dedicate to reviews as my personal and work life allow, so please continue to ping me on things if you feel I have overlooked something. All of the above still applies (mostly focused on bug fixes and small or QoL improvements over new big features), but hoping to at least make a dent in all the new PRs so we can have a very healthy new contributors list to come! I also plan to start a discussion next week about the release process -- see what was missed/went wrong with 25.12.19 -- and would really use some community input there so we can get a new release cut soon.

[jtdavis777]

Thank you again to all of the recent contributors! If you are tagged below, it's because you've pinged me recently to review your code and I want to share my appreciation for your excitement :D feel free to tag others who have recently been active in the repo to let them know this is here. I also want to share that the discord for this repository does exist, and if anyone wants to collaborate on features or bug fixes, that is a good spot to do so!

• @tmimmanuel
• @dataCenter430
• @statxc
• @RenzoMXD
• @Desel72
• @fliiiix
• @KevinZhao
• @fawdlstty
• @satur9nine
• @relativityspace-jsmith

[tmimmanuel]

Thanks for your support in keeping FlatBuffers better. Personally, I think Google should take greater care in maintaining their projects—not that they're lacking in quality; their work is truly helpful and beneficial. It would be even better if the community collaborated more closely.