Today, Brian, Bryn, and I are beyond excited to announce that we’re making Spectrum 100% open source. Every single line of code that powers Spectrum, front to back, is now publicly accessible on GitHub: https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum

For those of you who don’t know, we began working on Spectrum in February 2017 to scratch our own itch. We’d spent years building and maintaining communities for our day jobs, businesses, and side projects, but the software available just wasn’t built for modern online communities. A short while later, we realized that others had the exact same problem, so we quit our day jobs and started working on it full-time.

Since initially launching Spectrum, we’ve shipped thousands of features, fixes, and improvements—most of which were ideas and requests from you, the people and communities using Spectrum. Up until now, though, the most meaningful way to get involved in Spectrum’s future was to let us know when you found a bug or thought of a feature you’d like to see. By going open source, we hope to open up another avenue to get involved!

While the size and complexity of our codebase might be daunting, we’ve prepared contribution instructions, identified some great beginner issues, and are around to help you get up and running.

“What does a production GraphQL API look like and how do you query it? How do you architect a real-world large React app? How do you handle background jobs in Node.js?”

We’ve worked through a lot of these issues, and hope you can too by looking through our code and discussions. Just like we’ve learnt a huge amount from some other wonderful open source projects, we hope this helps you learn from what we’ve built!

On top of that, even if you’re not into contributing code, this change will allow you to see our entire development process, how we prioritize features, and what’s planned for the future.

We’re excited to be building this platform for communities with you, whether it’s through collaborating on our code or simply increasing the transparency of our process, but that doesn’t change our business model. We are still working hard to build the best tooling for community managers—as a quick taste of what’s to come take a look at our recently updated pricing.

We’re also hiring some full-stack JavaScript developers—if you’re passionate about online communities and have experience with React and Node.js hit us up at work@spectrum.chat!

Our team is fully remote, so you can live/work from wherever you want. Our product is only a year old (and now open source!) and there is still a lot of foundational work to be done. If meaningful, open-ended product challenges sound exciting, we’d love to hear from you!