Thank You For 2015

This holiday season, we want to thank all of the people and groups in the developer community who have joined us in this journey. No matter how many Droplets continue to be deployed, what we care about most is the vibrant community of people that continue to display their passions across the community spectrum. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Users

A lot happened in 2015. We opened datacenters in Frankfurt (hallo!) and Toronto (hello!), made new operating systems and applications available, added features like Floating IPs, Team Accounts, and more. One of the biggest and hardest accomplishments was the migration of 3,500 servers to version 1.5 of our codebase which affected users across 4 datacenters. It was a team effort for us but through all of it we have our users to thank. And thank you for telling us how we can improve.

Collaborators

A heartfelt thanks goes out to all of the people who built on version 2 of our API! Our community wrote API libraries covering many popular programming languages, adding support for more integrations. Special thanks to:

• Antoine for working on the PHP wrapper,
• Jeevanandam for his work on the Java wrapper,
• Matt’s work on Node, and many others as well.

Many open source projects also built or improved integrations using new features in the API this year, thanks to awesome work from contributors like Paul Stack with Terraform and Forrest Alvarez with Salt.

Also, big thanks to Prometheus for creating an excellent set of building blocks for a monitoring system. And last but not least, Brad Rydzewski and the community around Drone for tirelessly taking our feedback and improving the tool we use for Continuous Integration.

Authors

Thanks to over 90 incredibly talented authors — including representatives from the MySQL, DEIS, and Sandstorm teams — we added over 140 new community-written tutorials to our growing library. These articles and tutorials help countless users learn to use up-and-coming technologies. In addition, thank you to the community users who share resources and answer technical questions in the Q&A section (a very special shout-out goes out to Adam Robertson, Jonathan Tittle, and Woet).Thank you all for lending your expertise to help others!

Source: Tweet from @nycforward

Local Meetup Groups

We plugged into the greater developer community this year by hosting over 75 tech events at our space, including events for groups like:

• Manhattan.js,
• Women Who Code
• Meteor
• Write the Docs

Additionally, we were delighted to host a number of technical talks by:

• Joe Stein on Apache Mesos
• George Neville-Neal on the history of FreeBSD
• Dave Cheney on dependency management in Go

Furthermore, we were honored to have #WOCinTech Chat use our office as the location for a set of freely available stock photos featuring women of color in technical roles. Thank you to all of these individuals and groups for creating amazing experiences for technologists!

Photo credit: #WOCinTech Chat

And You!

Thank you all for inspiring us and for continuing to demonstrate what makes tech such an amazing community to be a part of. From the coder just getting started to seasoned developers, we are incredibly grateful for our community and all that they build, create, and share. As always, we will continue to support you and show our gratitude. We can’t wait to see what you create in 2016 and we’ll be here with you all of the way!

by Stephanie Morillo