We were taken aback by the enthusiastic response from the developer community. I've told this story a few times: one evening a couple of weeks after launch I noticed a Github issue about an edge-case permissions anomaly, submitted by someone in Sweden. Cool, I thought, it would have taken us ages to have spotted that. Then I went to bed. In the morning I checked my emails over breakfast. Overnight, a stranger from Mongolia had submitted a fix! And his Github profile photo showed him on horseback, somewhere on the Great Steppe! The miracle of open source! Global altruists doing our work for free!

Of course, it wasn't all so easy. This is our first big open source project, and we were unprepared for the effort we needed to put in to manage our nascent community. We lost some excellent early contributors by failing to respond quickly or positively enough. We didn't articulate our direction adequately, which meant that some developers wasted time submitting pull requests which didn't fit our plans for the project. Our documentation fell behind our features.