You might have noticed things have changed a bit in the past month. GitHub issues are plastered with more than just “question” or “bug”. Or you might have noticed that there’s a new repository for meeting notes. Or that some guy from Nebraska is overtaking your twitter feed about webpack beta releases.

Or maybe you are just discovering webpack, and we’re excited to hear that! Because thanks to you, things are getting real.

Introducing the Core Team

Let me introduce you the webpack core team:

Graphic from Kent C. Dodds and Javascript Air website

Johannes Ewald (github twitter Johannes)

He has been working on the styling side of webpack. He does this in his free time, while working on a web development startup. He has also been involved with loader and plugin teams under the webpack org.

Juho Vepsäläinen (github twitter Juho Vepsäläinen)

He wrote a book about webpack and webpack-merge. From now on he will coordinate the webpack documentation effort.

Sean T. Larkin (github twitter Sean T. Larkin):

He is responsible for community communication/outreach and marketing. Besides speaking at ng-conf 2016, evangelizing webpack to the Angular community, and working about 10hr/week on webpack, he is also working on the angular-cli team helping them replace their build system with webpack.

Tobias Koppers (github Tobias Koppers)

He is the author of webpack and does the core engineering. While previously doing this in his free time, he now reduced his day job to work 1 day/week on Open Source.

Enough about us though

You as the developer, have done your due diligence; looking at source code, searching for answers in our less-than-ideal documentation, and raiding our GitHub issues list for any way to make webpack work in your development stack.

You’ve become authors of plugins and loaders, sharing your open-source ideas with the community to make webpack a home for users of libraries and frameworks like React, Angular, and so many more.

To every single user, supporter, evangelist, and open-source author: Thank you! The number of loaders and plugins have increased ten-fold. Besides some of the awesome features you have suggested and inspired us to bake into webpack, the true power of webpack is the sum of its parts.

You have helped make webpack what it is today, and will be tomorrow! Like we said, things have changed, the growth is real, and now we’re calling on you to help us.

Since June 2015, we have seen the popularity of webpack grow over 400%.

Courtesy of npm-stat

Call for new maintainers

You may have noticed that we get a bit overwhelmed by the tons of issues in all the repositories inside of the webpack organization, which had forced us to concentrate on the most popular repos. Sadly this leaves the less popular ones unmaintained.

This may be problematic to you if you are using one of the “less popular” modules published by us. That is why we are looking for new maintainers for these repositories:

Loaders

Plugins

Other

How to contribute?

If you want to contribute to the these or even the core repositories, help is welcome. Please contact us if you are interested.

Conclusion

We want to use this blog to publish news and announcements regarding webpack and its ecosystem. We have a lot to talk about, and we will attempt to publish information about new features on regular basis.

We may also publish summaries of new findings in the webpack ecosystem. For example cross-links to other interesting blog posts about webpack related topics.

Here are some things you can look forward to hearing about in the near future:

2.x Release Plan

We want to write about the release plan for webpack 2. This will not include a concrete date but a short summary of things that need to be done before the release. Hint: engineering is mostly done, documentation is top priority.

Donations, support, and funding

The other topic we want to communicate is funding. Currently the donators don’t get anything for donating. We want to change this and better recognize you for your donations. We’ll talk about our plans for incentives, branding, recognition, etc.

Leave a comment

Like we said in our meeting notes this week, why not just leave a comment and tell what you expect from the new blog?