The first commit to the electron/electron repository was on March 13, 20131.
10 years and 27,147 more commits from 1192 unique contributors later, Electron has become one of the
most popular frameworks for building desktop applications today. This milestone is the perfect
opportunity to celebrate and reflect on our journey so far, and to share what we’ve learned along
the way.
We would not be here today without everyone who has dedicated their time and effort to contribute to
the project. Although source code commits are always the most visible contributions, we also have to
acknowledge the effort of folks who report bugs, maintain userland modules, provide documentation
and translations, and participate in the Electron community across cyberspace.
Every contribution is invaluable to us as maintainers.
Before we continue with the rest of the blog post: thank you. ❤️
How did we get here?
Atom Shell was built as the backbone for GitHub’s Atom editor, which launched in
public beta in April 2014. It was built from the ground up as an alternative to the web-based
desktop frameworks available at the time (node-webkit and Chromium Embedded Framework). It had a
killer feature: embedding Node.js and Chromium to provide a powerful desktop runtime for web
technologies.
Within a year, Atom Shell began seeing immense growth in capabilities and popularity.
Large companies, startups, and individual developers alike had started building apps with it
(some early adopters include Slack, GitKraken, and
WebTorrent), and the project was aptly renamed to Electron.
From then on, Electron hit the ground running and never stopped. Here’s a look at our weekly
download count over time, courtesy of npmtrends.com:
Electron v1 was released in 2016, promising increased API stability and better docs and tooling.
Electron v2 was released in 2018 and introduced semantic versioning, making it easier for Electron
developers to keep track of the release cycle.
By Electron v6, we shifted to a regular 12-week major release cadence to match Chromium’s. This
decision was a change in mentality for the project, bringing “having the most up-to-date Chromium
version” from a nice-to-have to a priority. This has reduced the amount of tech debt between
upgrades, making it easier for us to keep Electron updated and secure.
Since then, we’ve been a well-oiled machine, releasing a new Electron version on the same day as
every Chromium stable. By the time Chromium sped up their release schedule to 4 weeks in 2021,
we were able to shrug our shoulders and increase our release cadence to 8 weeks accordingly.
We’re now on Electron v23 (and counting), and are still dedicated to building the best runtime for
building cross-platform desktop applications. Even with the boom in JavaScript developer tools in
recent years, Electron has remained a stable, battle-tested stalwart of the desktop app framework
landscape. Electron apps are ubiquitous nowadays: you can program with Visual Studio Code, design
with Figma, communicate with Slack, and take notes with Notion (amongst many other use cases).
We’re incredibly proud of this achievement and grateful to everyone who has made it possible.
What did we learn along the way?
The road to the decade mark has been long and winding. Here are some key things that have
helped us run a sustainable large open source project.
Scaling distributed decision-making with a governance model
One challenge we had to overcome was handling the long-term direction of the project once Electron
first exploded in popularity. How do we handle being a team of a couple dozen engineers distributed
across companies, countries, and time zones?
In the early days, Electron’s maintainer group relied on informal coordination, which is fast and
lightweight for smaller projects, but doesn’t scale to wider collaboration. In 2019, we shifted to
a governance model where different working groups have formal areas of responsibility. This has been
instrumental in streamlining processes and assigning portions of project ownership to specific
maintainers. What is each Working Group (WG) responsible for nowadays?
- Getting Electron releases out the door (Releases WG)
- Upgrading Chromium and Node.js (Upgrades WG)
- Overseeing public API design (API WG)
- Keeping Electron secure (Security WG)
- Running the website, documentation, and tooling (Ecosystem WG)
- Community and corporate outreach (Outreach WG)
- Community moderation (C
