Togglz is looking for a new maintainer

[Christian Kaltepoth]

Hi all,

I started my work on Togglz in later 2011, right after returning from my first IT conference WJAX 2011 in Munich. I visited a talk about continuous delivery (I don't remember the speaker's name anymore) and learned about the feature toggles pattern. I was very impressed by the underlying idea and immediately searched for feature toggle libraries for Java. To my surprise, there were no really good libraries out there. So I created my own library, which became one of the most popular feature toggle libraries for the Java platform.

Today, 7 years later, Togglz is incredibly popular. The Togglz core module was downloaded about 29k times from Maven Central last month. For me, that's quite impressive. I never expected Togglz to become so popular. But that's all because of the great community that formed around the project. We got so many great contributions, especially in form of integration modules with other popular Java libraries and frameworks. I created Togglz with extensibility in mind, and I think that this was the most important success factor. People were able to integrate Togglz with any technology very easily.

Unfortunately I don't find much time to work on Togglz anymore. I don't use it very often in my own projects and when I use it, it has all the features I need. Today I spend most of my time working on JCP/Jakarta EE projects which consumes a lot of my spare time. I tried many strategies to create a sustainable way to keep Togglz alive in the last years. First it was a simple donate button, then I created an OpenCollective group, but actually I was the only one donating money to the collective, which was frustrating. Working on OSS is really hard. Everyone expects that you are doing all the work. Of course there are a few exceptions, especially people contributing bugfixes and new features, but these cases are very rare. I'm feeling guilty. There are many users who actually use Togglz and depend on maintenance of the project. And there are a few people who actually want to help the project. But I even don't find the time to review their code and give feedback anymore. My spare time is limited and my family has higher priority.

Therefore, I'm stepping down from my role as the Togglz project lead and from being an active committer.

I guess most of you are now asking "What will happen with Togglz? Is the project doomed?". Well, this depends on you. In the best case, one of the current committers is willing to become the new lead and take on responsibility of reviewing pull request, decide over the technical direction and doing the releases. I would love to see this happening. If nobody steps up, Togglz will be unmaintained in near future. Of course this would be very disappointing for everyone, so I'm hoping that this won't happen.

Christian

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Christian Kaltepoth

Blog: http://blog.kaltepoth.de/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/chkal

GitHub: https://github.com/chkal