Storybook: The Next Chapter

Full-time maintenance and explosive growth

This is a follow-up to The Storybook Story, which chronicled the transformation of Storybook from startup to community-driven project

Storybook is the most popular tool for building and customizing UI components. It now tops 26k GitHub stars, 1M npm downloads per month, and hundreds of contributors from around the world.

Chances are that you’ve touched a UI built in Storybook without knowing it. Teams at Dropbox, Slack, Airbnb, Squarespace, Lyft, Coursera, Uber, IBM, and many more depend on Storybook to build the highest trafficked apps in the world.

For the last year, my partner Norbert and I worked nights and weekends alongside a dedicated core team to evolve Storybook into a thriving open source community. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that we’re working on Storybook full time as part of the Chroma team. This post explains what that means for the Storybook project moving forward.

Growing Storybook

Last year Storybook became a community-led project. Since then, the project has grown dramatically in every dimension: usage, core team size, developer community, and features. Storybook even won the “most impactful contribution to the community” award at React Amsterdam, the world’s biggest React conference.

Storybook’s monthly increase in Github stars via BestOfJS’s 2017 Rising Stars, with releases.

Along the way we shipped countless features to make component development, documentation, and testing more enjoyable. We also expanded support to nearly every view layer including React, React Native, Vue, Angular, and Polymer.

But supporting this growth takes a lot of work — from developing new features to fixing bugs, writing docs, refactoring, and release engineering. And even as Storybook has exploded, our ambitions for the project have greatly exceeded our available free time.

Going all-in on Storybook

When we were approached by our friends at Chroma to join forces and work on Storybook full time, we jumped at the chance.

We’ve worked with the Chroma team on Storybook’s design, development, maintenance, and promotion since our first community release. They created Learn Storybook, the best Storybook tutorial on the web. They also built Chromatic, a superlative UI testing and continuous review service for Storybook (which we use to develop Storybook itself).

Furthermore, they’re open source veterans who understand that the project is much bigger than one company. We’ve set up an open collective to collect independent sponsorship from a variety of sources, and we’re all committed to putting Storybook users’ needs ahead of everything else.

Storybook’s tremendous adoption gives us a clear picture of the project’s strengths and weaknesses, and how it can improve as a tool for component development, documentation, testing, and even collaboration. We see a huge opportunity to make the best tool for UI components even better, and we’re excited to go all-in to make it happen.

Norbert and I can contribute more to Storybook than ever before

Who’s behind Storybook

Storybook will continue as an OPEN open-source project where participation at all levels is welcome and encouraged! There are over 450 contributors from around the globe. The core team is spread across different continents and companies: