Reviving Sandstorm

By Ian Denhardt - 03 Feb 2020

Hi! I’m Ian Denhardt, a long-time Sandstorm user and community member. I have some exciting news to share. Let’s start by talking about some recent history.

It’s no secret that development on Sandstorm has been pretty sparse since Sandstorm-the-business shut down in 2017. The tone of that announcement was optimistic; while Sandstorm had failed as a business, as an open source project it had attracted an vibrant community, and there was hope that the project could continue to be successful outside of a for-profit setting.

Things didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped, however. While Sandstorm had had a healthy community of folks using it and building apps, there had been fewer contributions to Sandstorm itself from outside the company, and no one but Sandstorm employees had been doing major core development on a regular basis. Additionally, Kenton has had less time than he’d hoped to work on Sandstorm.

The project never quite died. It has continued to receive security and maintenance updates. Internationalization support was added, and several folks have stepped up to translate the UI into other languages. A few other features landed, and a few apps continued to see updates as well. But it would be more than fair to say that the project had stagnated, and while I and many others were still using it, it was clear that development wasn’t going anywhere fast.

That looks to be changing.

About two months ago, Lyre Calliope sent an email to the sandstorm-dev mailing list, starting a discussion on how to get the project moving again. Since then, I and others have been contributing code and documentation, and have had weekly “office hours” meetings. In spite of a full time job, moving across the country, and a new baby to take care of, Kenton has still managed find a bit of time to review and merge pull requests, and help plan. Here are some highlights of what’s been happening in terms of development:

Jacob Weisz has done a ton of much-need work triaging our issue tracker, and has been working on some updates to vagrant-spk, looking to get a 1.0 release out soon.

Adam Bliss updated our tooling for managing the docs website, to make review easier and so we can get updates out more quickly. As part of this, he’s updated the GitWeb app, and included support for static publishing. We’re calling the feature “GitWeb Pages”. He also fixed a long-standing bug in vagrant-spk, which will make the app development experience better.

Lauri Ojansivu has been working on internationalizing the mass transfer feature that was added recently, and translating it into Finnish.

I recently implemented support for apps scheduling background tasks, something that’s been a major pain point for developing certain types of applications. I’m working on a few follow-up tasks and related functionality, and put together a demo app that uses Sandstorm’s Powerbox API. To me, this is one of Sandstorm’s most exciting features, but having been implemented only shortly before the company shut down, it still has rough edges and the documentation is lacking. I plan to fix that.

As a community we’re once again very hopeful, and I personally am committed to spending what time I can making Sandstorm’s vision a reality. If you want to help, join us in the #sandstorm IRC channel on Freenode, and sign up for the sandstorm-dev mailing list.