Well ... interesting Meteor numbers in the State of JS

community
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Thanks, @sacha for keeping an open mind. And this is not a criticism of the survey work, I think it is an amazing survey. I’m just looking at the survey from Meteor’s perspective. And it seems that there is a large group of JS developers that I think formed their opinion in 2015 and had not given the framework another chance, meanwhile they continuously skew the results, year after year.

How did you come to this conclusion?

Newcomers form their opinion surveys like that, only a few actually try and judge. I joined Meteor when everyone was leaving because I formed my own opinion and ignored the FUD in 2015, seeing how much legwork the framework does and knowing I’d be tight on resources, and I’m glad I did, I’ve a running business now. But if I didn’t have the time to evaluate and just took results like that, then frankly I would not have been able to bootstrap a business.

With that said, I do think Meteor could get even better for newcomers and I think Tiny is doubling down on this in 2021, which is the right path in my opinion.

I personally don’t think it worth spending a dime on those who (would not use), no framework can please everybody, and that group seems small which is a good sign. I think the focus should be on existing users, interested, the never heard (which is actually growing) and folks who are not yet in the JS ecosystem.

What I’d be interested to see, is a breakdown of the “not interested group”, which is larger than any other framework. I think this is the symptom of the PR damage since 2015. From that list, I’d like to know the participants’ JS years of experience, age, what kind of venture they are on (working in large companies or startups), and if they ever tried Meteor in the last 5 years. I think there is the group I was referring to, they probably formed their opinion in 2015 and never looked back, and they are causing continuous PR damage and skewing Meteor overall result.

But yeah, I think it is better to remove Meteor from that survey altogether, at least for a year or two, and give Meteor room to breathe in 2021, especially with the new announcements Tiny is about to make.

But anyway, that is just my opinion.

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I answered “would not recommend” to meteor and i am maybe one of this group that you mentioned.

I think meteor did much to the JS-Community and the web in general. It was among the first “reactive” frontend-frameworks, made real-time updates and optimistic responses mainstream, spawned new tools like apollo, nextjs, and many more and even the JS suvey itself. It really did leave an impact! Its a meteor after all!

I used it a lot and i loved it. And i have still apps using it. Even until now i observe it, this forum, the github repo and tinys activity.

But if someone would ask me if I would recommend it, I had to say no. There are better alternatives if you are a professional team. It have been stagnating for a while now and I think that the ecosystem around has evolved much faster. Tiny is probably focussing on maintaining meteor, rather than evolving it. Because that is what the community that is left expects from it, at least thats my observation.

Removing it from the survey does not solve any problem. Its low numbers are also not that surprising, people have just moved on. Ember.js for example also scores low all the time, but its still alive and has its community.

Tiny and the community should now focus on making the lives easier for those who still use it as opposed to try to attract developers, as you also said. And maybe focus on people who are new in the business. I think its still amazing how fast you can be with meteor even as a beginner.

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Yeah Marc, you mentioned your optinion several times on this forum and I respectfully disagree with it each time (new features are being added and it is an evolving framework), but yeah for some use cases other frameworks will do be better, for others Meteor really shine, but eitherway I don’t think it deserves such a negative overall sentiments, i.e. I don’t think the sampled population is giving it what it deserves.

Also, I don’t think you belong to the group I was referring to, it is the “Not Interested” group that is relatively large, and not the “Would Not Use” again.

The “Not Interested” group is the issue, it is averaging at 46% year after year. And I’m betting most of those never used the framework since 2015 and just hold none-factual negative opinions. And I speculate that this survery sample is skewed toward the JS devs joined before 2015 and is hitting the same group (more or less) year after year.

Removing it from this specific survey shield it abit from the biased population sample that can’t give the framework a second shot despite the many improvements, announcements and roadmap goal. Those strong held negative beliefs don’t help the framework to move forward and they are really hard to change, I guess it is human nature, how often do people change their strong held opinions based on facts? rarely. It is easier to let them go and get a new wave of developers who can appreciate and evaluate the framework for what it provides today and not pre 2015. And Tiny is doing great moving in this direction.

The group of “never heard” is growing even in this survey, although I think it is under represented here since the survey is targeting more senior folks, because new JS developers are joining and will continue to join, and I think this is where the focus should be.

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We (Tiny) are going to evolve it, yes.

See HMR work (almost ready, 2.0-beta.6 available). See Tree-shaking work (close to be ready) and more to come.

Also see new options of deploy and free trials on Galaxy delivered past year and new (old) free deploy again and also including MongoDB. So, definitely no, we are not going to just maintain Meteor. Tiny is going to evolve Meteor and not just maintain it.

In the personal side, as I always say, I use Meteor on my apps as well, and I have many and I still recommend it for every new company that asks me about how to start in the web in 2021. There is no better way, I don’t know any better way in terms of productivity, easy of use and costs.

We need to split here: people learning new technologies all the time and people building businesses. Meteor is for people building businesses :wink:

I love to learn new technologies and I have used all of them already (NextJS, Flutter, etc) but for now I still choose Meteor for my production apps and I’m pretty happy with it :smiley:.

Also, I’m not just a JS focused guy, I have a lot of background in Java, as Java Architect creating many big projects for big companies for more than 10 years and I still choose Meteor today, even considering Java, PHP and other technologies that I’ve worked to create big production systems in the past.

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This is an interesting point that I already commented in a few calls with enterprise Meteor clients:

If Meteor was a new technology in 2021, with a new name and all the current features, tools, benefits. Nothing new, just what we have today but announced as a new technology I believe it would be in the hype again.

But I don’t think this is a fair marketing move.

I believe we need to get people interested in Meteor without losing Meteor brand. Meteor was amazing when it was launched and Meteor is still amazing today. We need to find better ways to promote that for newcomers. This is our challenge for 2021. I say “our” here as Community + Tiny.

The community has been always supporting Tiny and we are also always trying to support the community in all the possible ways. We are going to continue with this and improve even more our relationship this year.

Keep tuned for new opportunities to contribute more soon :wink: and again, thank you Meteor community, you are great. The best community I’ve ever worked with.

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Yes good point, I think this also hits the nail on the head with this survey sample.

Yes, I agree with that too. Also, the Meteor brand might be associated with some negative sentiment from the past, it also associated with a very loyal and committed base that actually makes money and build businesses, that worth a lot.

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I think this is the 3rd year I answered the survey. And every time I answered it, the survey itself introduced a number of new things to me that somehow resulted to me researching about these new things. My initial thoughts when seeing new things in the survey: if this is in the survey, then it means that this is important. This is way before I see the results of the survey which normally is months after.

Does the survey overall has a negative effect on Meteor? Any answer here is a hypothesis without available data to support it. And my hypothesis is that overall, the survey has positive effect on meteor with the bonus that the survey app itself is made from meteor. And removing it from the survey will have a negative effect overall. It sends a signal that meteor is no longer an important framework for the JS community.

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I think perhaps re-releasing Meteor as Meteor 2.0 when it’s ready (similar to what Angular did) might help with this - it could become a new option on the SoJS survey and might lead people to look at what changes have been made

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I agree that @znewsham a major bump might help for sure.

But yeah that 47% “No Interested” crowd looks like a stubborn one to me so I wouldn’t be surprised next year we see them saying the same thing.

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Perhaps, I wanted to voice an extreme solution, I myself also on the fence about removing Meteor from the list.

But as the survey currently stand, I really think, the result (as far as Meteor is concerned), is not really representative and might be misleading, and frankly I don’t look forward to seeing the same participants (those 47%) voice the same opinion in 2021 without giving the framework a second look, that is just unfair, not all opinions are equally qualified, and those who looked at the framework in 2013 are will not have the same opinion as the ones looking at in 2020.

Perhaps diversify and/or increase the sample size and ask when was the last time they used the tech, this might paint a more accurate picture and allow us to see more what is really happening.

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At this point, I don’t think a “rebranding” or a “Meteor 2.0” announcement is going to do much to change developer perception.

To change things significantly, I suggest the following five point plan:

(1) A set of “shoot outs”, where development of a sample application using Meteor is compared to development of the same application using alternative platforms. Is the Meteor version easier to develop? Result in less code? Is more performant? Is more functional? This will provide actual data about how Meteor compares, rather than the current state of affairs, which is just one developer’s opinion vs another’s. Update the shootouts every other year or so to keep them current with advances in Meteor and newly emerging alternatives.

(2) Improved educational resources. The reference docs are pretty good. The getting started tutorial is pretty good. What missing is the next step: once you understand the basic idea of the platform, how do you build something for production? I’m thinking something like Pup (https://github.com/cleverbeagle/pup). Maybe Tiny could “buy” Pup or sponsor it or something to make it more freely available.

(3) Improved consultant community. If a company wants to hire Meteor-savvy developers, how do they find them and evaluate them? It would be useful for Tiny to somehow “certify” or vouch for various developers to increase confidence from the community that if they need expert help, they can find it.

(4) Modern, regular, timely communication. We need a monthly podcast and a yearly conference. Thankfully, both of the above are starting to happen again! Tiny needs to make sure they don’t die out this time.

(5) Unify all of the above at Meteor.com. Provide one, authoritative place to find all of the above. This increases people’s comfort level.

Meteor isn’t a silver bullet for every single application’s requirements. No framework is. But I continue to believe that it has a place. The negative perception is a problem, but can be addressed.

Philip

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I totally agree that it would do great (or at least, better) if launched today. I don’t think it’s unfair to rebrand a project when

  1. it’s almost 10 years old
  2. it’s drastically changed
  3. it’s run by a new company
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17

I don’t see that as an evolution either and I’m an active Meteor user in Production for 5+ years.

These are small incremental steps of the existing Meteor (including Galaxy) and these are now “catch-up” with other frameworks. Evolution is to create something new, that wasn’t existing before. Copying it just means you’re not leading and just being a follower.

Also, I don’t see Tiny’s evolvement at all. I think if anything, it’s the community who drives it forward, albeit I do recognize that you’re trying and having a community manager like you is at least something positive but at the same time it’s the bare minimum involvement.

Who are the full-time employees that are actively working on developing new features for Meteor? I mean, let’s just look back when MDG was still actively working on Meteor and see how many people they had on it. That is something completely different than what I have seen from Tiny.

Their name speaks volume, the intended pun is indeed that Tiny’s involvement and investment is “tiny”.

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18

I have to disagree. This isn’t the communities challenge. Stop using free resources and invest some money into it yourself. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

The community is great but it’s not our responsibility to market it to newbies or convince those people that used it last in 2015.

You buy something, you need to invest dollars into it. Simple as that.

It looks to me like this hasn’t happened much from Tiny and milking a half-dead cow isn’t helping. You need to feed it and nurture it to become a healthy cow which will then give you more milk.

I was always sceptical how Meteor fits with the overall Tiny business. I still don’t see any synergy effect from the buy for Tiny, all I see is minimal investment and milking it like crazy, especially by asking the community to do things for free.

As it’s your employer, you surely can disagree (in public). It’s expected from you.

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Why all the skepticism toward Tiny? They have been extremely transparent from day one.

The business model is as clear as the sun and it has been working for years, actually it the other open source frameworks raising money that still have to prove their business model. And MDG had a larger team because a) the product was new b) they had tons of investment money, this was a growth period.

And yes, Meteor needs to attract newcomers and it is the best framework for newcomers. All the folks who established businesses were new comers at some point.

Side note, evolution is the right teminology. Evolution is a result of small icremenal positive change and we had many of those.

Bashing open source projector sponsors is never a good idea. Maintaining open source projectors is hard as is and hostility and negativity makes it 10x harder.

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I’m expressing my opinion, I have no problem if you or others have a different view.

If you want this an all positive, kumbah-ya community then maybe implement that posts are held automatically for screening by a Tiny employee first and critical posts are removed immediately.

So much about freedom of expression and I honestly haven’t got any benefit from the open source project sponsor so far. I’ve asked many times to integrate the Electron package under the Meteor umbrella but to no avail, so much about that.

Like I wrote, you milk a half-dead cow you cannot expect that it will recover and give large amounts of milk. That means no complaining about surveys being biased or unfair anymore. You’ve got what you deserved, it’s called a “reality-check”. I praise Sasha and team for their hard work they do, year after year.

Invest or shut-up, simple like that. But blaming that the survey is biased is the wrong approach. The survey is on a large enough base from a statistical point of view. The numbers are consistently more or less stable, as anyone agrees. The survey wasn’t biased in 2018, nor in 2019 or now.

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I think this is like asking npm.com to invest $ into bettering the NPM packages because you are dissatisfied with the updates or features…

As I see it there are two ways here: either you do not understand open source or if you do, you might be interested to “Stop using free resources and invest some money into it yourself. There’s no such thing as a free lunch”

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Yes, I am also expressing my opinion and I happen to disagree with you but honestly I have no issue at all with having different views, I think we are all here for more or less similar reasons and I know run a business. Also, Meteor forum is not shy of negativity at all.

As for the survey, it is possible (and frankly likely) that the sample is biased. There are more than 12 million JS developers, and the survey is hitting around 20 thousands, so around 0.2%. If you ask the same 20k every year, you will probably get similar result. It also a form of freedom of expression to be a bit skeptical of the methodology. But, I also applaud the affort by the survey team, I’m just speculating about the numbers and I wish we have more drill down on the data. There is always room to improve.

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That’s not how you assess if your sample is big enough to publish a survey. 20k is more than enough to reflect a statistically sound base of the JS community.

But this is going OT

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Judgement is almost always biased, whether it is about people or things. People, and that seems to be rooted in human nature, have polarized opinion about everything. Objectivity is a myth.

So what usually happens is that things or people seen as somewhat better than average usually get all the credit and enthusiasm, while things and people perceived as being below average are getting dragged down. “Good” doesn’t need to be objectively good, it’s enough to be seen as fancy or trendy or funny or lovely. That’s all very sad, but that’s how things work.

Is Meteor now fancy or trendy or funny or lovely? Well, ours is an infantilized world, let’s face it.

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