Getting involved in 2020

To sum up 2019, although the first half of the year was not eventful, we really ramped things up in the second half. With your help, we were able to reclaim access to the website, gain control over credentials used for deploys, join CII Best Practices, set up CommunityBridge for fundraising, make the Discord community official, release 2.4.0, and more.

Building a community together

As of October 2019, we’ve asked for your help regarding community support, database development, and client development. We also shared a volunteering form to let us know if you are interested in helping out (thank you to everyone who has already signed up!).

We did not forget those applications and we will start to process them in the upcoming month, and start reaching out soon after. We’ve also set up Slack channel for volunteers (#volunteers-2020) to help with communication. It is worth mentioning that you do not need any official approval or form submission to help out. There is no commitment required at all to volunteer.

There are many ways to contribute to RethinkDB. Although a working knowledge of C++ is necessary for contributing to the development of the database itself, there are many other essential components in the RethinkDB ecosystem that can benefit from users and developers with diverse backgrounds and skillsets.

If you are thinking about how you could help, here are some ways:

• Add new features and improvements to the database
• Identify, report, triage, and fix bugs in RethinkDB and its sub-projects
• Draft and edit documentation for RethinkDB and its sub-projects
• Develop and maintain client libraries for various programming languages (JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java, and many more languages)
• Update example projects like the nodejs-chat app to inspire others
• Help to answer the questions raised on the community platforms

There are a lot of ways to help. Let’s keep building this awesome community together!

Get involved

As an open-source project that is developed and financially supported by its users, RethinkDB welcomes your participation. If there’s a feature or improvement that you would like to see, you can help us make it a reality. If you’d like to join us, there are many ways that you can get involved.

Learn how to contribute to RethinkDB and find us on Slack, Discord, Twitter, or Freenode (#rethinkdb). Thank you!