On Lumo's Growth and Sustainability

This post reflects on Lumo's growth almost 6 months after its announcement, shares the project's goals and communicates what you can do to help Lumo grow into and even more full-featured ClojureScript environment. Read on!

In less than 6 months, Lumo has by far outgrown every expectation I had created. What started as a simple toy project has now become a tool that many of us use daily, either as a Clojure playground or in some more intricate use cases such as Mach, Calvin, Unravel and some more.

Lumo's demands are also already outgrowing what I had envisioned at first. And while it may not sound like such, this is a very good thing. Going forward, I predict the following are immediate needs that Lumo has.

Project's goals

Creating thorough documentation and develop a website

Lumo needs a website. And some documentation. This has been on my todo list for a long time and I feel like we need to tackle it sooner rather than later. There are costs associated with registering a domain name and hosting a website, along with all the effort of developing the webpage and writing all the documentation.

Have a logo designed

Given Lumo's current popularity, I believe having a logo designed aligns with the project's direction and would love to have this done when launching a website.

Sort out CI issues

Lumo has been having some CI issues. While this has been solved short term, I'm fairly confident they will start showing up again as more features are added, and that we will need to host our own continuous integration service at some point in the future.

Lumo build API

Lumo can currently build very simple ClojureScript projects with optimizations. Bringing the Lumo build API and compiler toolchain to feature parity with the regular JVM ClojureScript compiler is a goal that I believe warrants great benefits to ClojureScript's reach.

Even more

There is even more stuff in the pipes. Getting Lumo to work on the Raspberry Pi, for one, is a big short term goal. Supporting more platforms and 32-bit architectures is another that is potentially related to CI issues. Even more features are the development of idiomatic ClojureScript I/O, shell and HTTP wrappers for Node.js's APIs, getting Lumo on more package managers, and eventually tackling dependency management and resolution.

Today

Today I'm launching an initiative to ensure the steady growth and long term viability of Lumo. I've opened an OpenCollective page for Lumo where you can pledge your support for the project. You can choose to become a backer or a sponsor. Contributions can be one time, monthly or yearly, and in the amount you choose (as little as $1!). Companies can become sponsors too.

Note that contributions are not meant to be for myself only. Any contributor that devotes a substantial amount of time to working on a Lumo feature can choose to submit an expense to the project's funding.

Why Open Collective?

Open Collective' core value is transparency in contributions. This means that you will always be able to see what the contributions your pledge are being used for. Open Collective also lets project maintainers automatically issue invoices, so if you need one (typically as a sponsor company) the process is very straightforward for both parts. You can also cancel your sponsorship any time you'd like.

What do sponsors get?

Now, as a potential sponsor to Lumo, you must be asking what is it that you get for contributing to Lumo's Open Collective initiative. As a sponsor, you get several benefits:

• as a sponsor, your company's logo displayed in the project's README for every visitor to see
• I will also take your input into consideration and you'll have a say in helping steer Lumo's goals
• you will impact the speed at which new features are developed into Lumo's codebase.

Parting thoughts

This initiative represents a lot to Lumo's viability going forward. I urge you to consider backing or sponsoring Lumo to ensure its growth. Even if you don't back the project, I would be extremely grateful if you could share this post and / or the Lumo Open Collective page.

Thanks for reading!