Still Growing... (Thump Thump Thump)

Every now and then you’ll see someone start a thread on the mailing lists asking whether PostgreSQL is still growing, or if its dieing, or if its niche, or some such measure of the life of the project. Well, for open source, one of the main measures for the health of the project is to look at its developer pool; more developers means more features and robustness, which attracts more users, which brings in more developers, and the snowball effect goes on. With a mature project like PostgreSQL, I think it’s actually harder to attract new developers, because hacking a database is much more difficult than doing things like weblogs and cms systems, and with PostgreSQL we tend to have a pretty high standard for code quality that people have to meet. Personally when I see “newbies” come in and get their patches rejected 3 or 4 times, I am amazed anyone has the [http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=gumption gumption] to stick with it, but some folks certainly do, and it’s impressive to see it happen. With that said, I’m happy to note that we’ve just added a significant number of new contributors into the PostgreSQL developers bio page. By new I mean new to the page, a lot of these folks have been contributing to PostgreSQL for some time [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=”:-)” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]] Michael Fuhr Abhijit Menon-Sen Stephen Frost Mark Wong Marko Kreen John Henson Hannu Krosing Christopher Browne Emily Boyd Pavel Stuhle Heikki Linnakangas Anoop Kumar Hiroshi Saito Congrats everyone!