The Growth of an Open Source Community

By David G. Simmons / Use Cases, Developer
Nov 21, 2018

I’ve done this before for another Open Source project I was working on, but I find it so fascinating to watch that I had to do it for Telegraf.

Have you ever wondered what it would look like to see an Open Source project start, from nothing but a README, and then take off and become a huge thing? You can always look at the git logs to get an idea of how things have gone, but, like with Time Series Data, actually seeing it in a visual format really gives you some perspective. To that end, I give you the following:

telegraf-git from InfluxData Platform on Vimeo.

It’s about 5 minutes long, but you can watch the Telegraf project grow from its initial creation by Paul Dix on April 1, 2015 (I personally love the choice of April 1 as a project start date) to today. It’s a mesmerizing and fascinating look at how the project grew to what it is today. You can see not only the project grow, but the number of contributors absolutely explode over time. Telegraf, more than any other part of the InfluxData stack, relies on our community of developers and contributors for the incredibly diverse number of both input and output plugins supported.

So as we approach Thanksgiving here in the US, I’d like to have this go out as a special thanks to all the contributors who have made Telegraf such a robust, versatile, and amazing piece of software for gathering statistics and metrics. I use it every day, and I write plugins for it myself, and it really is a special piece of Open Source Software.