Jun 14, 2022
Gitpod raises $22,600 at DevX Conf to give to Open-source maintainers
Geoffrey Huntley
Michael Aring
And it’s a wrap. We want to thank everyone who joined us last month at DevX Conf and welcome readers who are reading about the conference for the first time. The talks are available for viewing and USD $22,600 is being distributed to Open-source projects that conference attendees voted for.
The conference is evolving to be a space where developer tool founders share what they’ve been working on all year. The themes that stood out in 2022 were automation (think, Fig, Warp, Supabase), collaboration (think, Zed), and integration testing (think, AtomicJar). The continued transition to cloud development was a centrepiece of discussions at DevX Conf. Next to Gitpod, we saw Okteto and Codespaces talk about remote developer environments.
Last year was the first year of the DevX Conference, and over USD $10,000 was raised and donated to unpaid volunteers and the maintainers of Open-source projects that underpin our digital infrastructure.
This year, thanks to the support of the conference sponsors AtomicJar, CodeSee, JetBrains, slim.ai, Tailscale, WorkOS, okteto and swimm we are pleased to share that we raised more than twice the amount of last year, that is, $22,600 USD. The funds are in the process of being distributed.
Distribution of Open-source Funding
Like last year, attendees voted on how to distribute profits from DevX Conf between Open-source tools maintained almost exclusively by unpaid volunteers. Here is the breakdown of how attendees voted to distribute this year’s funds:
| Name | URL | Split of funding from $22.6k USD |
|---|---|---|
| 01. ccls is a C/C++/ObjC language server supporting cross references, hierarchies, completion and semantic highlighting. | https://github.com/MaskRay/ccls | $1,040.79 |
| 02. erlang_ls is an implementation of Language Server Protocol for the Erlang programming language. | https://github.com/erlang-ls/erlang_ls | $594.74 |
| 03. ElixirLS is a frontend-independent IDE “smartness” server for Elixir. Implements the “Language Server Protocol” standard and provides debugger support via the “Debug Adapter Protocol” | https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls | $594.74 |
| 04. elm-language-server is an implementation of Language Server Protocol for the ELM programming language. | https://github.com/elm-tooling/elm-language-server | $892.11 |
| 05. hadolint is a smarter Dockerfile linter that helps you build best practice Docker images. The linter is parsing the Dockerfile into an AST and performs rules on top of the AST. It is standing on the shoulders of ShellCheck to lint the Bash code inside RUN instructions. | https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint | $2230.26 |
| 06. Haskell IDE Engine aims to be the universal interface to a growing number of Haskell tools, providing a fully-featured Language Server Protocol server for editors and IDEs that require Haskell-specific functionality. | https://github.com/haskell/haskell-ide-engine | $743.42 |
| 07. Ionide is an organization which builds high quality, cross platform developer tools for F#. Our flagship project is Ionide-VSCode - a Visual Studio Code plugin, with more than 1 million downloads, transforming VS Code into a fully-fledged F# IDE | https://github.com/ionide | $743.42 |
| 08. lsp-mode is a Emacs client/library for the Language Server Protocol with multiples languages support. | https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode | $1189.47 |
| 09. ruby-together is a grassroots initiative committed to supporting the critical Ruby infrastructure you rely on: Bundler, RubyGems, and other shared tools. | https://rubytogether.org/ | $1040.79 |
| 10. Rust-analyzer is an implementation of Language Server Protocol for the Rust programming language. It provides features like completion and goto definition for many code editors, including VS Code, Emacs and Vim. | https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer | $1635.53 |
| 11. rvm is the acronym of Ruby enVironment Manager. It manages Ruby application environments and enables switching between them.. | https://github.com/rvm/rvm | $1189.47 |
| 12. shellcheck is a tool that gives warnings and suggestions for bash/sh shell scripts: | https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck | $2676.32 |
| 13. patch-package lets app authors instantly make and keep fixes to npm dependencies. A vital band-aid for javascript developers living on the bleeding edge. | https://github.com/ds300/patch-package | $1189.47 |
| 14. php-language-server is an implementation of Language Server Protocol for the PHP programming language. | https://github.com/felixfbecker/php-language-server | $743.42 |
| 15. pre-commit is a framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit Git hooks. | https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit | $2527.63 |
| 16. vim-lsp is an async Language Server Protocol plugin for vim8 and neovim. | https://github.com/prabirshrestha/vim-lsp | $1337.16 |
| 17. yamllint is a linter for YAML. | https://github.com/adrienverge/yamllint | $2230.26 |
Only a fraction of funds has been distributed at this stage because, as an industry, we haven’t documented and established straightforward ways where companies can give Open-source projects money. If you are the steward of one of the above projects, please go sign up to GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective and/or publically document the process of how companies can support your project.
At Gitpod, we often wonder what the future would look like if these high achievers that our digital society is built upon were empowered to become independent artists. If just one of those people can help more people better understand a technology or improve the developer experience for an entire ecosystem what is the worth/value of that and why isn’t our industry doing that yet? In business terms, Open-source maintainers are unpaid and unsecured vendors.
Gitpod hopes other companies will also start taking steps to mitigate this critical risk in their technology stack. Paying for resources that are being consumed broadens the list of people who can do Open-source. Additionally, money enables maintainers to buy services and outsource the activities that do not bring them joy.
So what did we learn at DevX Conf?
The current generation of product creators is building developer tools with developer experience top of mind. It’s inspiring to see how much effort is invested into making small details shine - to help developers get the job done.
Developer experience also touches on the soft aspects that make teams succeed. Companies increasingly care more about developer productivity. As almost every company on the planet is turning into a company that writes and works with software, developer experience will become ever more important.
Modern engineering teams are mostly distributed and work on highly complex technology stacks. Tooling should not constrain; it should enable them.
The conference videos are now available
At DevX Conf 2022, we created a space where new concepts and ways of doing things were discussed and provided the stage to the growing number of contributors to the DevX ecosystem by highlighting projects that are at the forefront of developer experience.
Some notable talks by speakers at DevX Conf shared how to build an internal team focused on developer experience, how to onboard developers in a day, and approach product design and product management from a developer-first perspective.
All twenty seven talks from the conference are now available on YouTube and over in the Discord server you’ll find dedicated rooms filled with people who deeply care about the topic of DevX. We will be back next year, bigger than ever but until then cya in Discord?
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