Who is CEO of Meteor? [SOLVED]

meta
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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?

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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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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?

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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.

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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 :sweat_smile:
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! :tada:

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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.

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.

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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.

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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 :slight_smile:

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! :smiley:

(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!

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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.

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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.

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