Who is CEO of Meteor? [SOLVED]

[harry97]

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.

I’ve been reluctant to say this so as not to seem bitter or appear to have some personal vendetta with @filipenevola but most of you guys are jumping on this thread to wish him farewell and good fortunes when he didn’t have the common courtesy to let us know of his departure?! But was damn sure to promote positions at his new company and mentioned it off hand when someone asked him on Twitter? In what world do you guys live in?!! Are you even sure he’s going to read your comments?

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.

Picked it up at a challenging time, yes but left it at an equally challenging time.
Support for Node 14 is coming to an end. Work on Async API is far from over and @renanccastro is leaving too which wasn’t communicated too until I brought up, thanks @kevintayong. This all makes matters worse since I anticipated he’d pick up the PR.

I think you guys are forgetting to say good bye to @renanccastro too, no?

Finally for @fredmaiaarantes, you didn’t respond to my points adequately. Sorry mate.

Who are you going to assign to look after Blaze? Actions speak louder than words, it’d have been nice if you merged/approved the PR which I linked to showcase how much you care about it. What about the Async API PR now that both @filipenevola and @renanccastro are gone? And you didn’t say a word about job postings being made exclusively away from official Meteor channels like Twitter and the forums or even the very same job board you created?! What about Meteor Monthy?

I’mma be honest with you guys because I’m tired of biting my tongue, frankly I don’t think the current management is fit for the job. Where were you @fredmaiaarantes prior to joining Meteor Software? You weren’t even on the forums. Where are your contributions to Meteor? And now, you’re in charge of running Meteor? You might be fit for running Meteor Software but not Meteor the OSS project. If you cared about Meteor we’d have seen your face long time ago same way we see someone like @storyteller. Simply put, you don’t have skin the game. It pains me to see people like you in charge of running Meteor when community members repeatably tried to help out.

There’s something I’ve read quite recently which resonated pretty hard with me and I’d like to share with you guys:

History has shown clearly that conservative
religions flourish while liberal ones die out. The reason for this
is that religions depend on a nucleus of “true believers” in an
inflexible doctrine for inspiration, leadership, and finances, and
to make up the rank and file. When the central doctrines are
liberalized to accommodate outsiders, or malcontent insiders,
the mainstream members feel betrayed and offended, and
leave the fold. The outsiders and malcontents, being good lib-
erals, weren’t all that interested in causes in the first place and
soon abandon ship with the rest. The organization then shrinks
in strength and size to a mere residue of its former stature.

And I think Meteor right now is catering for the “liberal side” as we had just seen with @filipenevola and @renanccastro leaving and moving on. Remember @matthewwholling or @Elysse?

[storyteller]

While you bring up many good points Harry, contributions to Meteor core are not everything and only a tiny portion of community can do that (skill, time, idea, need, etc.).
Another thing that I have noticed in general is that certain communities tend to stay away from the global community and instead are active in their local community without much interaction to the global one, this is also often times related to language barrier (Japan is a nice example for this, and seems to me Brazil as well). Another part is the corporate vs FOSS developer where the corporate do not communicate on open channels like these forums. So not seeing someone on the core projects isn’t necessarily a good indicator of their involvement.

While I very much agree with the citation you put there, sometimes an outsider might be needed to come in crashing to get things moving to prevent death from stagnation. Meteor Software and everyone there don’t have it easy.

If I think back Filipe also, at least from my point of view, came out of nowhere, but he quickly proved him selves with moving things forward. Fred and the next CEO are going to have to do the same. The community is watching.

[harry97]

While you bring up many good points Harry, contributions to Meteor core are not everything and only a tiny portion of community can do that (skill, time, idea, need, etc.).

I absolutely agree OSS isn’t everything, people have to put food on the table and are busy with their jobs to contribute to it. In some cases, OSS is nothing but free labor where large corporations benefit from gullible/novice developers who are trying to contribute and gain recognition. OSS, isn’t what it used to be, people need to be wary of what they contribute to.

Actually pretty lately I’ve started to ponder the use of contributing to FOSS, that’s why you might have seen me go silent on collection2, although I used to be pretty active with issues/PRs.

Why should I work for free if I’m not being compensated for it? When I could be using my own time for my own benefit, even if I’m not doing anything “productive”. Before, I used to look down on those who don’t contribute to FOSS and thought they were inferior to me, the all benevolent, tech savvy, FOSS contributor that I’m, but nowadays I admire those who only work on proprietary stuff, claim their money and enjoy their free time.

I’ve spent almost an entire week worth of full time work, if not more, to remove underscore from the entire Meteor packages ecosystem, but was merely met with a cold rejection to say the least. Is that something @fredmaiaarantes you’re willing to look into?

Another thing that I have noticed in general is that certain communities tend to stay away from the global community and instead are active in their local community without much interaction to the global one, this is also often times related to language barrier (Japan is a nice example for this, and seems to me Brazil as well).

Again, a solid point which I agree with.

Another part is the corporate vs FOSS developer where the corporate do not communicate on open channels like these forums. So not seeing someone on the core projects isn’t necessarily a good indicator of their involvement.

Sure thing but when one of your main duties is to contribute to FOSS, it’d would be a huge benefit to have some prior experience.

If I think back Filipe also, at least from my point of view, came out of nowhere, but he quickly proved him selves with moving things forward. Fred and the next CEO are going to have to do the same. The community is watching.

That’s true but Filipe was around prior to coming in the picture whether on the forums or open source side. But still you got a point.

I’m sorry @fredmaiaarantes if my words came too strong, as you may tell I care deeply about Meteor and want to see it flourish which is why I get so emotional about it sometimes
But I’m definitely looking forward to you turning things around as we have nothing but common goals and I’d be the happiest man if Meteor makes it for both of our benefit.

BTW, is today your birthday? Happy birthday Jan!

[harry97]

Some other point, I think needs to be brought up since we’ve got this far. Meteor is in a critical condition in my opinion. Because Meteor suffers from loss of knowledge. What do I mean by that, please view the video below.

Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

I tried to update sockjs but failed. Why? Because we’ve no idea why certain stuff are the way they are!! The grey breads are no longer around.

You can say there’re five layers to Meteor:

1. Simple packages – check
2. Mid tier packages – accounts
3. Higher tier packages, which mostly have to do with DDP, multiplexers and how pub/sub works in general. We can count Cordova stuff amongst them too. – DDP, Cordova Can you tell why I’m upset @renanccastro left?
4. Build system, which is located in tools directory from what I’ve gathered.
5. Packaging system, very selected few been able to fiddle with this since it relates to the private code which Meteor Software owns part of. And it suffers from issues that’re yet to be solved. Did you know Meteor downloads 345mb during installation?!

Now, most Meteor developers orbit around the first and second level, even less when it comes to the third level. But very, very, few tap into the other two. @zodern, @benjamn @arunoda @klaussner @slava and the previous MDG team are those chosen few. Only @zodern remains today.

Please, don’t get this wrong this isn’t some FUD or me trying to cause a state of panic but indeed now Meteor is more dependent than ever on @zodern contributions. He’s a great guy, he runs Monti APM and is in it for the long run.

And to be fair, Meteor Software is doing great work, collaborating with him and ensuring everything stays in check. But what if some catastrophe befallen him --God forbid–, and he’s no longer able to contribute? There must be some passing of torch and we ensure that there’re multiple Zodern(s) in our community instead of merely assigning throwing every build related task at him. What happens when he’s no longer around?

In short, we should nurture a new generation of the old MDG team. And I hope you place this atop of your list @fredmaiaarantes. Maybe propagate this higher up the chain to Tiny’s management and try to get in touch with some of the old team? BTW, something which I’m dying to know does the acquisition terms forbid Tiny from acquiring old MDG staff? Did you try to even acquire some of the old devs? Is that something you can tell us or comment on? There’re lots of stuff the community was kept in the dark about. Maybe @awilkinson can chime in.

[alimgafar]

Harry,

Since you made a point of calling out my well wishes to Filipe, I’ll respond this time. I don’t know the circumstances of his leaving, when who knew what, and I don’t want to speculate. However, I did point out that as an organization, Meteor Software should have handled this differently.

I don’t believe in wishing anyone badly, and I’m not going to start with Filipe. I don’t think it accomplishes anything. To my knowledge, he didn’t make any promise to stick around for some particular time or event. So he made a choice to move on.

Would I have preferred that he share his plans with us before cutting ties? Yes. But done is done and I don’t think it materially changes anything. You suggest he was uncourteous leaving without letting us know. I think some will agree with you. But I don’t think returning a discourtesy with another is the right thing to do. At least for me it isn’t.

Has Renan left? TBH, I didn’t have any interaction with Renan, but when he leaves, I will wish him well too. I’ve met Filipe in person twice, spent quite a bit of time with him each time, most recently last summer here in New York. While not many, each of the phone calls I had with him went well over an hour. So of course I am going to wish him well publicly. If I have personal complaints, I’ll take them up with him.

I get your frustration. Just because I wish him well doesn’t mean that I’m handwaving away the rest – I believe I said as much AND supported your points in my post. You have brought up many legitimate shortcomings. Your point about the greybeards is something I hope MS thinks deeply about. More than just handling pull requests, when that deep knowledge goes away, the entire community suffers from the loss of that insight, and without those greybeards to turn to teach you how to navigate those upper tiers, most developers will quickly move on to another framework.

For my part, I’m taking @fredmaiaarantes at his word and will wait to see what the team’s action plan will be.

just to be clear, Harry, I’m not beating on you.

[DanielDornhardt]

I just wanna throw in my hat with @harry97 here.

He’s making very good points.

My quick take is this:

• Meteor is and always was a great framework, batteries included, from the beginning.
• The communication & marketing from the core team & core organization was basically atrocious from the beginning and got worse from there year over year

Marketing material & communications weren’t really focused anywhere since about 1.0. Maybe if you’d been in the states you could have met some of the guys / leads / CEOs on the “big meetups” but direction and transparency was always missing, to me at least.

Individuals often made great personal contributions, time, support and tech-wise. I don’t know how some of the developers managed to handle the hundreds of issues and change requests, while also innovating on parts of the core whilst being basically the Meteor spokespeople at the same time.

But that modus operandi never looked sustainable to me.

The community would really like to come together under an umbrella which would really focus and march on in a clear & useful direction. But it never really materialized.

I think there’s a clear need for a transparent structure & more communication.

There need to be a

• “Visions” - Team which “gets” Meteor and decides on priorities and general direction
• “Execution” - Team which makes sure things get done & organized
• A sales & marketing branch which really knows how to organize & pick up the torch. It can’t rely on one or two single individuals to do all of the things while also doing coding, Podcasts, community outreach & checking merge requests for complicated issues.
• A team of developers, a few real hardcore pros which really get to grips with everything, including level 3-5 of @harry97 's pyramid
  • additional devs / interns / volunteers etc which help & work with the core team to build up experience.
  • probably one or two core dev team members unfortunately will have to be mostly busy with organizing the tasks, PRs, and managing the work
• Administration & Finance: There needs to be someone responsible for this too.

Basically what always bugged me was
a) the total lack of transparency of everything happening behind the closed doors of “the meteor core team” or later company, whatever that was at the time
b) There always seeming to be only one to two “Supermen” having to do basically everything, from doing all the dev work as well as all the company communication & community outreach. That’s just unrealistic and unsustainable.

I’d really love to pitch in to create a fund / patreon or whatever or pay a yearly “Meteor Premium Member” fee so a structure like this could evolve & thrive. But for this there’d need to be a clear picture of how the team would be organized & what would be expected from it.

Please please please get someone at the rudder who knows how to sail a ship like this.

Feel free to contact me (&probably @harry97 :D) (+Edit: The whole community of course!) to shoot holes into all of your plans until the ship is solid enough to sail the interstellar sea!

(PS: If this is wrong and I just don’t know where to look to get all the Meteor news please let me know! I’d love to stand corrected.)

Thanks & Meteor is awesome, let’s make sure it’ll stay amazing!

[pmogollon]

This is a very valid point I wanted to bring attention to.

Many times I have been looking in to the code of meteor inner working trying to rework/improve some things, without any luck, mainly because almost nothing is documented and its working its complex. Unfortunately im not @zodern or @benjamn, I many times have a bit of time to try work on things, but then meeting a brick wall with no docs, and very probably if im lucky there still another brick wall when creating the PR, there has been a lot of interesting PRs that have ended in the trash with not much feedback or interest from the core team.

I love meteor, but theres a lot to improve.

Maybe the team can spend sometime and start talking more to the community and help to unite everyone in to the same direction, with clear guidelines, objectives and roadmap.

[cmoore]

I have to agree a lot with @harry97 . Unless something nefarious or disagreements occur, it’s common for C-level employees to give 6 or more months notice. Just leaving your post because you feel like it’s now or never to achieve your dreams of whatever is a dick move and holds no integrity. It conjures up images of the person in question working hard at seeking the funding of a new venture while still being paid to do the job of taking care of this community. (Hint, the community probably wasn’t being taken care of. It’s like cheating on a partner.) Then when the funding is secured, they go on vacation, post some Instagram pics like all is well and come back and quit. The community feels had.

If in fact it was known said person was leaving, well then it’s on the company. The community still feels had.

It left me with a bad gut feeling. I’m putting my time, energy and trust into an ecosystem that I want to pay off and this puts a huge damper on my energies. I had plans of doing some of my own promoting of Meteor by way of YouTube videos on things that I have learned to get things accomplished with Meteor. Things that are interesting and could draw new recruits into the ecosystem. I’m taking the weekend to think things over and explore a bit.

[timheckel]

Hi, long time user, not very vocal member. Let’s take a collective breath and chill for a moment.

I wish @filipenevola all the best and am super grateful for Meteor and its community. Meteor is a FREE platform licensed under a super permissive MIT license that has granted many people (including myself) a way to build apps at a speeds previously untenable. Again, this is FREE, with a decade+ of expertise (and technical debt) poured in. I recognize that this situation with Filipe causes a bit of turbulence, and communication could have been handled better. And yet. Let’s just take a beat.

I’d really love to pitch in to create a fund / patreon or whatever or pay a yearly “Meteor Premium Member” fee so a structure like this could evolve & thrive. But for this there’d need to be a clear picture of how the team would be organized & what would be expected from it.

Love that idea, @DanielDornhardt. I think Galaxy is prohibitively expensive for my use case, but would still like a way to financially help the project. Addressing the node fiber dependency needs to the #1 priority in my mind.

[ylebihan]

@DanielDornhardt wrote and @timheckel quoted :

I’d really love to pitch in to create a fund / patreon or whatever or pay a yearly “Meteor Premium Member” fee so a structure like this could evolve & thrive.

“Meteor Premium Member” : I buy both the idea and the subscription . Being a long-time paying Unity user since 2006, I can’t emphasize enough the benefits of such a formula from a developer’s point of view.

If we look at how big Unity has become nowadays thanks to its clever business model, no doubt they’re as happy as we developers are : it has been a win-win long-term strategy. Glad to see I’m not the only one wishing Meteor would take a similar route.

[harry97]

I decided to let the dust settle yesterday in the hopes of calming down and letting a chance for the community to chime and share their opinions. And, two things have happened since then which I’d like to share:

• Meteor now sponsors @storyteller
  

  

• @distalx reached out to me via Meteor Slack and had this to say:

From a dev to another dev. (I learned this from my senior)
Whenever we have bug or malfunctioning in the system. We can criticize/analyze this thing into infinity.
What would be beneficial to all is to debug and fix the thing. And we can do it rapidly if all hands are on deck.
The same way you have ignited something and it has momentum. Now if you like you can use this momentum to help up all move forward. I’d very much like that. Or we can still analyze what went wrong.

---

Great job @fredmaiaarantes and MS as a whole, this is what we anticipate when you say you’re grateful to the community. We’re all grateful for many things in our life but seldom we show it. I believe many of you shared your intentions of helping out. We can’t expect MS to do all work and sit back, we too have to earn their trust and prove our worth. So, I invite you all to sponsor storyteller. I’ve been reluctant to pitch in since my income isn’t stable these days but we’ve to put our words to the tests. And I, for one, can’t let MS one up me. Are you going to let them? There’re plenty of other developers who need our help. This invitation goes out to the entire Meteor community and anyone reading my comment.

Also, @timheckel a new kid on the block just showed up who might help you with your problems, just saying.

Feel free to contact me (&probably @harry97 :D) (+Edit: The whole community of course! ) to shoot holes into all of your plans until the ship is solid enough to sail the interstellar sea!

DanielDornhardt if you’ve got time to reach out or listen from one, I recommend reaching out to @storyteller, he’s been putting in work behind the shadows and continuing to do so. Though like he said to @dr.dimitru he has some announcements to make in due time, so let’s all sit patiently.

Part of the reason I didn’t comment yesterday was because I wanted to hear what @fredmaiaarantes has to say and I was meaning to bring more points of criticism but comments made from all you guys made me realize it’s better to focus on what’s coming and use this momentum for good.

So, I’m going to end it on positive note and recommend what I see best for Meteor’s future:

• Hire @storyteller to work on Marketing side, seems like MS is ahead of us.
• Hire @dr.dimitru to replace Renan. Why? Well, he said many times how he’s willing to chip in and help remove fibers. So, he can pick up the fibers PR, no problem. And he uses Cordova from what I can tell which will make him even a better candidate as this is exactly what made Renan shine.
• Hire @jkuester to work on Blaze, he resurrected autoform from the dead, fixed Blaze CI and many more. A perfect fit, if you ask me.
• Sponsor @captainn to work on React; @akryum on Vue.
• Have zodern mentor someone to look at the tree shaking PR. zodern can once again do all the work but this’d be a perfect time to showcase the passing of torch and we finally get someone else other than to him to contribute to build related stuff. Ask him whom he would like to mentor and see how it goes. Surely zodern can hop in when some urgent stuff needs to be done but in general he should move to a coach position than a player.
• Quickly put together a plan for 2.8, where fibers is the top priority and announce it on the forums. @fredmaiaarantes can step in, talk about himself let us get to know him more. This’d show the leadership commitment to Meteor and communication in general.

I use words like hire and sponsor interchangeably, but you get the idea.

These’re my thoughts for the mean time, but I’ll edit this post if something pops up in my head.

[storyteller]

@harry97

Meteor now sponsors @storyteller

I would like to clarify the sponsorship thing. There is no contract between me and Meteor Software in this regard. It is just regular sponsorship of my usual FOSS/Meteor related activities for which I’m grateful and this new sponsorship will allow me to spend few more hours a month on Meteor stuff. No strings attached, but we are talking about great many things. Many thanks for the sponsorship!

I would like to again underline the call to action to sponsor FOSS developers and projects. Not just here in Meteor (which I and others would be thankful for), but for those projects that you use in your apps.

Thanks a lot to @harry97 and @fredmaiaarantes for their sponsorship! I hope @harry97 that your income becomes even more stable in the coming months. People should also consider sponsoring @harry97 , even though he does not have GitHub Sponsors, he has alternatives, so check out his page.

I’m thankful for new all my new sponsors and will do my best to deliver value to them. As I mentioned I’m out of my current contract in a month, so things will really pick-up after that. In the mean time next weekend I’m planning to do a live stream about building a Web 3 login for Meteor (live coding, so you can imagine how this can go, but thankfully I have some practice from a side project with NFTs that I helped with).
In April I will hold a hangout and maybe one more themed social aside from the usual activities for my sponsors. Much more to come in May and hopefully I will have some more announcements soon.

[DanielDornhardt]

Hello Harry, I wanted to get back to this, because I think it’s an important conversation and I don’t know where else this is currently discussed. And you seem to have at least a bit of the bigger picture

It took a while for me to get back as I’m in the middle a project and I’ve got some plates spinning currently, sorry for that.

I’ve since started to support a few of those developers linked here: GitHub - harryadel/awesome-meteor-developers: Support your Meteor community!

But I think it’s semi-optimal still as it’s not clear who’s gonna work on what, how, for how long.

I’d rather have an “ETF” for my investment which automatically updates the recipients as the time goes on, and also some gremium or somebody to distribute the money and gives out specific roles and responsibilities, instead of having multiple individual agents pick up tasks without central organisation.

Maybe that’s all fine and dandy, but to me it’s a bit of a “scattershot” approach to the situation if you get what I mean.

For example, I started donating to two or three of the “heavy-hitters”, but others I ignored - because it’s hard for me to estimate what they are working on.

Also, some focus on some things which aren’t in my wheelpark, library-wise, for example, so I might skip those.

It just doesn’t feel enough.

Just sayin’!

I’m happy that there is more awareness again about the direction & outside appearance of Meteor as well, let’s keep the good times rolling!

[harry97]

I commend you for the “ETF” part . Actually, I had noticed you sponsoring the three of them right away. I even followed you on GH and wanted to extend my gratitude for stepping up and doubling down on your words but I was lowkey afraid it’d seem sleazy in a sense as if I’m asking for some for me. But definitely thank you!

I totally agree with you as there’s not a clear vision on how our contributions are being put to work. Who’s working on what and given more or less support how this would impact their support. Are they even reliant on our support or merely doing it for side income? Lots of questions.

This is a very serious concern and while I don’t have an immediate answer for that I’d tell you this is something @storyteller working on mediating and will have some news to announce in due time so no need to worry .

[filipenevola]

Hi all, thank you for all the messages here and also in private.

It was a great pleasure to work inside Meteor for 2 years and a half. My relationship with Meteor started as a user, then a few PRs as contributor, then evangelist and so on, so it was a long relationship and it was an amazing journey.

Thank you all who supported Meteor during my time as an employee, your support meant a lot.

I still have Meteor projects and still believe in the future of Meteor, of course, I’m not going to be as active as before but Meteor will always have a special place in my heart and also in my code sessions.

As @fredmaiaarantes said I’m pursuing a different path now trying to cause impact in Brazil’s education.

Again, thank you!

[paulishca]

Hi, I short follow up with my understanding of this conversation.

1. There is still no information about the Slack group anywhere on the Meter website (or I am not able to find it). I mention this because it looks that Slack is the first or main or the more proeminent channel of communication from Meteor to Community (my understanding from the first messages in this topic).
2. The leadership structure no longer includes a CEO.

[fredmaiaarantes]

Hi @paulishca, we just updated the website, adding the link to the Slack community in the menus. We’ve had this link on the Meteor Cloud dashboard for a long time, and we’re going to figure out the best place to get more attention to it on the website.

Regarding the CEO role, do not worry as you will hear about it in the next month.

[alimgafar]

Just so there are no surprises, I want to let you all know that I’ve been in talks with Tiny and Meteor for the last two month, and you will see that I’ve announced joining the team to help out on, among other things, community growth and the new Ambassador program. There will be an official announcement here next week.

If you want a preview, you can see my LinkedIn profile.

[jessa]

Tiny Capital promotes Meteor CTO Fred Arantes to CEO

This announcement has been a long time coming. After Filipe’s departure in April, @fredmaiaarantes volunteered and was given permission to take on the CEO’s responsibilities.

Today, we’re announcing that Tiny Capital has promoted Fred fully to CEO, effective immediately. You can read the formal announcement here and on LinkedIn.

Fred has been working hard behind the scenes to bring on dedicated resources to work on the Meteor open source team and build bridges with the developer community through new initiatives like the Ambassador program.

We hope you will welcome him to this new role, and help him make Meteor the best framework for building software fast.

Cheers!

[paulishca]

this is really funny. I’ve been in this thread just a minute back trying to mark it as [SOLVED] but it is no longer editable