Who is CEO of Meteor? [SOLVED]

Hi, who is the CEO of Meteor?

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From the slack:

Fred Maia 8:30 PM

Hey all, I know we should have communicated this in a better and official way but yeah Filipe left Meteor a few days ago and this has nothing to do with the continuity of Meteor itself.

We appreciate all the work and effort he put in Meteor and his position will be replaced very soon and we keep working in the framework and in Meteor Cloud as usual, also in Meteor University.
He is pursuing a dream of investing in the education area in Brazil. Nothing will change for us, so you don’t have to worry at all.

In fact we are hiring and growing the team. Our plan for this year is to make Meteor even more stronger for all the JS community.

Sadly communication still needs a lot of improvments… But I don’t think it changes much for Meteor, and thanks @filipenevola for the great work.

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I like Meteor because I feel confident working with it and it is great for teams but everything we write is done with an easy-to-plug-into-something-else approach. I have 0 worries about the future of Meteor and I am confident it is here to stay. Was just a little surprised to see no communication here. I am not in the Slack group.

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Thanks, @filipenevola for the great work. And happy to know that you are pursuing your dreams.

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I wish @filipenevola a great next chapter in his life, I completely understand the passion for education and passing the knowledge to others.

Filipe has been a wonderful Meteor advocate and he picked Meteor at a challenging time and set it on track, the next person in charge has a very clear path set for him/her.

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Thanks for all the great work @filipenevola !

Looking forward to the next chapter in Meteor, have a lot of suggestions for what needs to be added.

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Thanks, @filipenevola

Hi everyone, I’ve said almost all of this in slack, but I’d like to reinforce it here as well.

Meteor is still going strong after 10+ years and in fact, we’re growing our team! I was recently promoted to CTO at Meteor and on this CEO transition, I’m basically running all we need on the business side as well. We have additional developers joining us very soon to improve MeteorJS, Meteor Cloud, and of course, Meteor University.

We would like to thank @filipenevola for all of his amazing work and contributions to Meteor and his position will be filled soon. He is pursuing his dream of further advancing the education field in Brazil - nothing will change for Meteor, so you have nothing to worry about!

Our plan is to make Meteor even better than before and to continue to grow our incredible community. :raised_hands:

Thank you all for your understanding and patience at this time.

Please let me know if you have any questions. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi Fred, congratulations on your new position.

The following is purely about communication. I feel everything else is fine and satisfactory.

I don’t want to be too critic about it but I personally don’t use Slack, I checked meteor.com for a slack communication channel and it is not mentioned or I couldn’t find it.

Like in the past 8 years, I would prefer to get my announcement in due time and from a recognized channel of communication like this forum. We have a tradition here, on this channel, if this tradition has changed I would also prefer this to be communicated.

As I understand from above, the communication on Slack was about failing to communicate “in a better way”. I know Filipe is not impolite nor the rest of the team and in most of the modern countries there is a notice period when leaving a job. There is no problem in the fact that he left, people move on, but I see a problem in the way this was handled by both Filipe and the rest of the team and I wish/hope/expect that your team will be more … fair and open towards the community in the future.

We are here, in this community, because we use Meteor; some of us finance Meteor when buying their services, others contribute to code, it is only fair that we stay open with one another. If someone from the leadership leaves or comes, I would like to know it, if Meteor is closing, expanding, changing, I would like to know in due time and not by accident from some guy in Medium or Twitter.

I am glad your team is growing and I am looking forward to welcoming his replacement.

On another note, I noticed Meteor had a Series D funding 2 years after the acquisition by Tiny Capital. I would like to have an announcement, whenever possible, on the State of the Meteor Union and Meteor’s future objectives including any public data about profitability, valuation and eventually performance against competitors.

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I love Meteor - but agree that communication has not improved much in the years.

That 130mm investment almost made my eyes pop out - did some research - pretty sure this is an error on the website behalf. Apollo raised 130m Series D but they are no longer Meteor.

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Hi everyone, we thank you for your understanding and patience at this time.

We decided as a team to keep the news on the “down-low” until we can find a way to communicate it without making it seem like a “bad thing”. However, the news broke out and we didn’t get a chance to communicate it officially to the Meteor community.

With that being said, we will do our best to be more transparent and open moving forward. We have updated our Culture page where you can see the current team members of Meteor. View it here: Culture: Learn more about the Meteor team.

We’d like to extend our full gratitude and apologize if this has caused any inconvenience or worry to the community. We hope to see you continue to contribute in any way possible as we will continue to keep growing Meteor. :pray:

@paulishca As for the Series D investment in 2021, I think @msavin is right. It’s probably an error on the website’s end and the funding is for Apollo, not Meteor. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I just checked the culture page, is @renanccastro no longer part of the core team?? since @filipenevola is no longer around who’s going to continue work on this PR?

Also, regarding the communication and continued support of Meteor Projects. Blaze was promised better support after Tiny’s acquisition but what we witnessed was entirely different.

They very first major release dropped Blaze as a view for the default boilerplate and no big work was done to Blaze aside from HMR and deprecation of underscore which is a task I personally undertook.
Moreover, PRs are held hostage to the core team review! A team that doesn’t even contribute to the project?! Sitting on an important project such as Blaze and merely merging pull requests by the community doesn’t count as active development, last time I checked.

Have you considered relinquishing Blaze to the community?? Or giving a community member such @storyteller maintainer rights?

Honestly, I believe binding Meteor to a company is doing more harm than helping. A CEO left; a CEO hired. Who cares?! While Meteor was born thanks to MDG, it morphed into its own being. Meteor Software/MDG needs Meteor to survive but does Meteor need Meteor Software to survive?! Mind you, community members offered to step up when Meteor was neglected by its parent company at that time. If Meteor Software was made to choose between fixing a downtime and merging a pull request? Which would come first? Meteor is a mere tool for Meteor Software to advance its plans and attain new members so it always comes in second. Such interest is displayed in the Meteor Software to Core Team members ratio.

Meteor is put on a leash and has to acquiesce to its parent company whims and wishes. It’s always affected by its parent company reputation/position.

People need to be reminded that if it wasn’t for the community, Meteor would’ve faded a long time ago:

At some point, I believed MDG/Meteor Software is the best thing that happened to Meteor, offering free hosting! but nowadays I don’t think the same. Imagine if Rails embeds Heroku by default into its own CLI! I don’t want to use some proprietary service forcefully. And if I wish to do so it’d be on my own terms. You can’t even decouple Galaxy from Meteor CLI. If Meteor wants to get better it needs to break away from its chains, period.

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We have additional developers joining us very soon to improve MeteorJS, Meteor Cloud, and of course, Meteor University.

Regarding hiring new developers, it has come to my attention that some opportunities related to Meteor Software/Meteor are announced to the Brazilian community exclusively and not the broad Meteor community. Which is kind of ironic given the fact Meteor Software started https://jobs.meteor.com/ to promote Meteor jobs but refuses to post on it.

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Jan ( @storyteller ),

Are you still around? Do you have any insights?
We are curious what’s next for the planned features, since some of them critical and being open (wip) for 2+ years. I’d appreciate your input

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Yes, I’m still around. Right now I have a full-time non-Meteor contract, but it ends at the end of April, so in May I will be switching to work on Literary Universe and other Meteor projects. I hope to have stuff to announce in the next few weeks, so please stay tuned. :wink:

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As you have noticed, @renanccastro is leaving. He will stay with us until the end of this month.

Regarding the open PRs, we are discussing to find the right people to take care of them. I’m still in contact with Filipe and we talk almost every day. I’ll soon have calls with some people from the community like @diaconutheodor, @storyteller, and @radekmie, just to name a few. I’m open to hearing you all.

Throughout my career I have always been present in communities, collaborating in as many ways as possible. I’m aware of how big is the importance of the Meteor community, I know we have many challenges and many areas to improve moving forward and we have great minds here willing to make this happen.

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Hi @harry97, we’re sorry to hear your experience with Meteor has not been a pleasant one.

We’re doing everything we can to do better and be more transparent as a team. I agree that without much help from the community, Meteor won’t be where it is today. And we’re thankful for that!

I just talked to @kevintayong and one of our goals is to attain new members to join the Meteor community and to experience the wonderful “magic” behind Meteor. Growth is good - which is why we want to share Meteor with the world. For long-time Meteor users who want to give back, this is a great opportunity to help out new developers coming into our space.

Again, we are grateful to all contributors and their hard work and dedication does not go unnoticed. We have some big plans for this year and we aim to be closer to the community.

Thank you for bringing this negative experience to our attention. Again, I apologize for this, and I’m sure we can do better.

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I don’t post as often as others here but I lurk quite a bit :laughing:

First, I wish @filipenevola all the best in his new venture. I know what it’s like to get called away on a passion project. I hope he has great success with it. During his time at Meteor, we’ve had a very good relationship, and I found him to be very responsive and authentic. So I am sad to see him go, but I am happy he’s pursuing something he cares about.

Now, I have to say, I completely agree with @harry97 's observations. And I think there are many of us who feels his frustration. He’s right.

Seeing @kevintayong’s response of ‘We decided as a team to keep the news on the “down-low” until we can find a way to communicate it without making it seem like a “bad thing”’ made me cringe. In my experience, this kind of change is typically handled on the board level – and for good reason, judging from this.

I’ve had 2 similar very recent experiences with a departing ED at a foundation, and with a departing GM at a business, on both of whose boards I serve. In each case, the outgoing leader wrote a departing letter to stakeholders [staff, customers, donors] , with the message going out about the same time. Same with past companies, with notices also going out via corporate communications. These are general best practices.

What’s done is done. I’m hoping we see less of this. Hopefully the new management team will ensure there are better procedures for handling this kind of thing, and consider discussing among themselves succession planning so if someone leaves midstream, there’s a plan in place that can be communicated.

@fredmaiaarantes has moved the conversation in the right direction quickly. So I’m very encouraged that positive action, not just words, are in the works :smiley:

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