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đź”— End of year wrap up 2022

· 10 min read

⏳ And just like that, 2023 draws near​

We at the Pact team love nothing more than making microservices testing easier, our community and churning out the code. This year has been no exception. As many of you have wrapped up for your christmas break, we thought we would take some time to reflect on the year and the communities achievements.

Pact Open Source Community Survey​

Our new survey is now open! The purpose of this survey is a pulse check on the community. In order to serve you in the best possible way, we'd love to understand how you use Pact and engage in our ecosystem. If you have contributed to any Pact Open Source projects or have engaged with Pact social media and Slack chats, you are welcome to share us your thoughts! The data collected in this survey is anonymous. We intend to use the data to better serve you and to promote the Pact community. Complete the survey here.

Brought to Life through Visualizations​

Earlier in the year we mentioned we rolled out Orbit.love to help us track activities across the Pact Foundation's many open doors.

I would login into GitHub, Slack, YouTube, Slack Overflow, Twitter, check my emails, all before I could get down to any work. I imagine the story is much the same for our maintainers, when they get that precious free time to code, it can be exhausting. Orbit gives me a single view I can go to every day, and see who is posting asking for help, or where the activity is, so I can come jump in a help out.

We’re still in the process of determining the most effective usage and views of the data, in a wider context rather than just helping us on the day to day. We are thinking about ways we can expose the dataset (as it’s all publicly available information from GitHub), so that you can tell us what you make of it. Think of it as an interactive state of open-source survey if you will! The good news is that we’ll be doing so together with our friends over at the Cucumber and Swagger communities. We even hope to extend it over the SmartBear GitHub account too.

Pact community engagement in 2022​

Community growth in 2022​

We saw over 3,000 of you interacting with us via our open source channels, and introduced 2.7k more into the fold.

The 2022 community heroes.​

Thank you for participating in the Pact community, we couldn’t do it without you.

We really couldn't resist taking a look at what organizations are using (and we hope loving) Pact. The list below is ordered by organization employee count.

We're a small team at Pact, so we also rely and appreciate contributions by teams and individuals leveraging Pact. Below is a list of organizations ordered by the active members using Pact who have interacted with our public repos. In most cases, these are individual people, or small teams often giving back improvements to the Pact framework from time out in the field. Why not read some of their testimonials and case studies here and add one of your own 🥰

Community growth since 2013​

We looked back on the history as Pact, as we near 10 years, over 12 thousand of you have followed along.

I wrote an interactive history lesson of Pact which you can check out here

Big innovations: the Pact Plugin Framework​

We were pleased to launch the Pact Plugin Framework to the masses. As with all our major initiatives, it is true to our open source roots and we hope that unlock new capabilities to a community of builders.

Our first plugin provides support for testing gRPC with Pact, and Pacts core, built in Rust, provides a Foreign Function Interface, unlocking Pact’s capabilities in supporting languages.We look forward to 2023 and the introduction of Pact’s feature-set to a few more languages, some of which are waiting to be built.

Hopefully by you!

In the meantime, why not get powered by Pact plugins and create your own?

Find out how to get started

Supporters of Pact​

Pact’s biggest sponsor got even bigger this year.

SbHeartPact

Pact arose while PactFlow's Co-Founders Beth Skurrie, Ron Holshausen and Matt Fellows were employed by Australian technology consultancy, DiUS, supporting companies of all sizes to transition to cloud-native application development and to accelerate their digital initiatives.

PactFlow is now part of a much wider quality initiative after being acquired by SmartBear. We care so much for OSS and are so pleased that SmartBear has a strong and demonstrated commitment to OSS — as proven through the support and scale of Cucumber and Swagger. Through our partnership, we will be able to take contract testing to new heights and help deliver key milestones in Pact’s OSS roadmap, and bring closer alignments between our now larger family of open source tools, and smooth pathways between our open source and commercial tools. Providing you a seamless, and wonderful experience, whichever tool you are using.

We are always on the look-out for new contributors, across any of our languages, and if you have interest or have used Swagger, Cucumber or BDD principles in the past, we would love to hear from you. Drop me a note in Slack.

We would also love to wish our DiUS family thanks for all the support, and helping us reach bigger heights, and ultimately help more people. We'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you.

What's in store for Pact in 2023?​

With a successful 2022 under our belts, I am so excited for what 2023 has instore! You can check out Canny, our public feature board for the latest run down on upcoming initiatives.

If you feel like something is missing, why not request it, or come talk to us in our Slack?

Big call outs to get excited about​

  • Pact Plugin ecosystem – we look forward to helping the community build plugins for the most requested content and transport types
  • V4 + Plugin support in all Pact foundation supported languages
  • Support networks provided to help the community build new plugins, and language implementations
  • Improved governance and project planning
    • The Pact project is depended on, by millions. In order to improve the quality of life for maintainers and contributors, we would like to bring some best practice open source engineers principles to the Pact project, to help it evolve in a vendor neutral fashion, and live for many years for come.
  • Revised documentation, training materials and examples
    • We are on a journey to help not only simplify the adoption of contract testing, but with SmartBear’s support, to help provide you patterns and techniques to building quality, scalable software, that moves as quickly as your customers do. We would love your support in helping to smooth the path.
  • Help us design real-world example applications, that we can use to demonstrate not just Pact, but other testing tools, to show you can pick n mix your way to success.
  • More community events
    • Pact's 10th Birthday Bash
    • Local Pact community events
    • SmartBear Dev Rels’ Celebration of open source
    • Hackathons
    • Code Alongs
    • Summer of Source
    • CukenFest - A BDD Conference
    • Pact + Swagger + Cucumber meetups

Pact Almanac 2022​

I always love the idea of Almanac’s, probably from being sucked into Back to the Future as a kid!

image

So here is my go, a veritable buffet, corralling of some of the best bits of the year, mainly in your own words. There is so much good juice out there, for this Devo Avo to squeeze. I won’t focus on any of the big milestones centrally in the project, but rather your individual contributions and wins, you can go through our blogs bi-monthly updates, or check the GitHub repo’s themselves for an immutable source of truth. 🕵️

January​

Feb​

Mar​

  • Lewis Prescott, the Pactman himself, started his blog series and Podcast dedicated to our favourite topic with some of the players in the industry helping you calm the chaos.

Apr​

May​

  • Marie Drake again, delivering a contract testing 101 at her previous employer Zoopla where she evangelised Pact, she now works as a Developer Advocate as k6.io and is always putting out great content.
  • Tamerlan Gudabayev delivers a great post that helps what contract testing is, and where it fits in in your testing lifecycle.

June​

July​

  • Bas Dijkstra has been helping individuals, teams and organisations build quality systems for years with automation. This in-depth 6-parter are words from a sage.

Aug​

Whilst this feature in a Pact Broker, exists only in PactFlow (our commercial sponsor and guardian) the source code is open source and lives here for the underlying tool. If you want to help make improvements or use it to aid and augment your testing efforts with your OSS Broker, or if you use other mechanisms bar a broker to share pacts. If you do, we would love to what you are up to!

Sept​

Oct​

Nov​

Dec​

Pact Broker Graph

Pact saves the holidays, by ensuring those in charge of getting the turkeys to your table are deploying safely!

If you've done something great, and want to share it, get it listed - the site is open source and you can edit any page, we want to give you a platform to help amplify your voice!

Maybe there is time to get one last in before crimbo! No, only joking, that’s a wrap for this year's Pact Open Source Almanac, pop your feet up, enjoy your puds and hope to see your name in the book next year.