Backstage Turns Three!
TL;DR Spotify released Backstage into open source three years ago today. Since then, the community has grown by leaps and bounds to stretch across the globe (and the Discord server!). Now that Backstage is a threenager, the growing pains are real. So, on this birthday, we want to cover our collective efforts to make it easier to adopt and contribute to Backstage.
They grow up so fast, don’t they?
Happy birthday, Backstage! Three years ago, Spotify released its homegrown developer portal into the wild after a small team collaborated on an internal Hack Week project. We’d had a lot of conversations with companies looking to build out something similar to what we’d been running for years, so our Hack Week sprint started as an experiment to see if the Backstage core plugins could be valuable in open source.
It's cliché at this point — because we’ve said it a million times — but no one could have predicted what came next.
In three short years, Backstage has grown to a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Incubating project, with more than 900 adopters and 1000+ contributors worldwide. Companies like CVS Health, Siemens, LinkedIn, REI, Vodafone, and Lego are building out their own developer portals from the Backstage framework and bringing their learnings to the project.
A few more stats we love to see (mainly coming from the project repo):
- 3k+ project forks
- 38k+ commits
- 12k+ PRs
- 15k+ total contributions
- 21k+ stars on GitHub
- 9k+ Discord members
- 100+ open source plugins in the plugin marketplace
But, without a doubt, the best thing about the Backstage project is the people in this community. People who are curious, collaborative, and excited to share knowledge. People who’ll sift through Discord at all hours to answer questions and support one another. People who come from all over the world but share a common trait: being passionate about enabling developers to do their best work.
Don’t take our word for it! Take a look at this birthday video we put together with a few community members.