Visualize

Speaker 0: Directus plays a pivotal role in making your data accessible to everyone in your organization. It's really our core mission to democratize data. Now providing access to your database collections and items through the data studio goes a long way but this is really where Directus Insights shines. If you're not familiar, Directus Insights is our dashboard builder and panels don't have to stop at just displaying data, They can also include forms and other interactive elements providing ways to then act on that data, making dashboards an excellent canvas to build internal and back office applications. We've released lots of great educational content in our docs, on our developer blog, and our YouTube channel to help you build custom panels.

And in Directus 10.7, we've given a lot of love to the insights module. I wanna hand over to Connor to tell you more.

Speaker 1: Hey, y'all. There have been several dozen improvements to Directus Insights in 10.7. Here they are. Firstly, we've added some useful tools to help you manage your insights dashboards. You can now duplicate entire dashboards, export and import, and apply bulk actions.

There's a brand new panel selection user interface, and if you build custom panels, you can provide your own graphic here. It doesn't only look nicer, it does a better job of illustrating what every panel does. You can now comment on dashboards, making them a good canvas for collaboration. Naturally, we've also made enhancements to existing panels, including a bunch of styling options for label and metric panels, number formatting for metric panels, including style, notation, unit, and granular decimal settings, And my favorite, the ability to add multiple series to line charts, which is really useful when understanding your datasets and how they impact each other. Finally, we've released a new metric list panel, which lets you display a list of metrics, such as the top 5 selling products for the quarter, a global leaderboard, or the most viewed pages on your website.

There are loads of quality of life improvements in Directus Insights, but you'll have to download Directus 10.7 to discover them. Thank you for having me. I hope

Speaker 0: you enjoy all the new features. Bye y'all. Thank you so much for that, Connor. Directus really is the sum of its parts, and that includes you, our wonderful community. So it would give me great pleasure to introduce our CEO and cofounder, Ben, to take the mic and say a few words.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Kevin. Lots to cover today. This is a really exciting event for us. We have a long history at Directus going back to 2004, when I first created the the platform, as part of my agency in New York City. As some of you might know we based this platform on phpMyAdmin.

So that kinda goes to show how, you know, legacy the roots of the system are. We've subsequently open sourced this, you know, years later, Rich joined the team, and we continue to grow throughout 20 years of product development and growing our team. So today, what I'd like to really dive into is the community side of our of our organization, which really is the most important extension of our core team. And we're gonna focus on 5 key aspects of this community that I think really help understand how we got here 20 years later. And we're gonna start off with GitHub.

GitHub is inarguably in my opinion one of the most valuable metrics how for how we measure success. I remember, you know, back in 2017 and this is on our our Twitter feed. You can actually see there's a piece of hardware, that just showed this metric, you know, GitHub stars. And I think it was 1400 or thereabouts, back then. Now I have a digital version of the same thing where we are at 23,496.

And it would be amazing if we could just push it over you know 24,000 and beyond. But this metric has been so amazing at quantifying, how developers feel about our software. Watching the curve of seeing those GitHub stars go up. We used to be blown away by every single individual star and now it seems like a month doesn't go by where we don't go through a 1,000 stars. So, you know, that has been our guiding light GitHub stars.

Those star stargazers. Thank you all so much. The next on that GitHub side of things would really be just contributors. There's the overall contributor network, but who's actually submitting those poll requests to our, our repository. I think we have 350 plus contributors going in and doing pull requests, contributing to our discussions, fixes, and of course taking part in our license change.

You know just a few months ago we made a big paradigm shift moving from GPL to BSL and we did this with our community. We did this through GitHub. And so thank you to everybody who's been involved in everything from PRs to figuring out exactly how we make this into a sustainable organization. The third piece of GitHub, would be issues. This is just a really interesting metric.

It kinda is the sum of our discussions and pull requests and fixes all of these different components of GitHub. But we actually just a few weeks ago passed 20,000 of these issues which is just an insane number to me. And so, you know, across stars contributors and issues, that's the GitHub side of our community. It's really just the annex of all of our, our work. You know both the code and community, comes together there.

Next up, diving into Discord. So if you look at the authoritative, you know, GitHub as where our our source code and we're tracking the project, Discord is more of an ephemeral community building. We have our events. We have, both our core and community located in in Discord. We started off on Slack a little more business oriented, and we shifted over to to Discord and I I believe we passed maybe a month or 2 ago 10,000 members, of this platform which again on the community side is just so meaningful to have people engaging and interacting, asking questions, giving answers, you know, talking about their collaborations and things they've built on our platform.

It's just amazing to see that, it's it's, you know, being a little, obsessive about checking all of my channels and seeing all these unread channels that, you know, minutes later, they just there's more people chatting. It's it's just it's just so exciting to see. So beyond sort of our core team, which is in some private channels, our community, which is in all the public channels, we also host a lot of events in our Discord, server. So we have everything from office hours, and request review where we cover you know the process of how we look at our feature requests through GitHub and then we form we go through you know what's how do we decide what comes next. How do we you know evaluate these these requests alongside the business needs and growing the business.

So lots to cover. If you want to join those events. You know there's always something going on even in this leap week. We're adding in like ad hoc events you know after these pre recording pre recording things we're actually circling back and you know spending some time on discord chatting about these these releases that we're we're announcing. So join us on those maybe even after this, in Discord.

You know, don't mention the core team, but you can certainly come in and join those events and just start those dialogues. Next we have user groups. So user groups is sort of the transition from maybe digital to, you know, in real life. We have, you know, this amazing piece of software. We have this telepresence and videos and all these great events and everything through Discord.

But how do you actually bridge the gap into the real world? And we're doing that through regional global events. So our team is global. Our community is global. Our platform is global.

And so our events are also global. We've done New York City, and London and Berlin, so far. And really excited to announce right now that we have several other regions that we're that we're pushing imminently. So San Francisco, shout out to our amazing investors, with True Ventures. We have Amsterdam, the home of Rijk Van Zanten, our our CTO and co founder.

And we have Paris, coming up where if you've been following along, we have Alex, our new, director of engineering who joined us from the Nuxt team. So he's he's, out of out of Paris or out of, Bordeaux actually. So really exciting to have these these moments to go meet up with our community, have some pizza, hang out and talk shop. And if you want more information, if you're looking for notifications on these events, we actually have an events page on the website. You can go and sign up for those per region.

So that's, that's where you can go, for next steps there. 4th is guest authors. So contributing to the platform can come in a lot of different ways. Obviously, you can contribute via code. We talked about events, but content, you know, documentation and articles.

How do you use these amazing capabilities? When you have a a toolkit, and there's infinite ways you can piece it together to build different things. And so we love having this guest author program we've just started, which gives us the ability to bring in contributors, to actually have them share the tooling that they're building for Directus. You know, whether it's on Directus or beside Directus extensions, etcetera. Different deployment options.

We have, you know, everything under the sun from DigitalOcean or Platform SH. There's so many ways you can deploy it. We can't cover all those. So having guests come in with their domain expertise and talk about you know these different methods is is an amazing avenue to creating that content. I think we even had an like an AI based game that was created using our flow system which is our our automation tool.

So really amazing. You can again go to our website and learn more about the guest author program and that's run through GitHub. So same as a pull request or anything else, you just pitch your idea. You'll work with our team and we'll get that formalized and and give you some cash. Next and last is our hackathon.

Our hackathons. This is probably, you know, the most exciting thing that we're doing right now. When you talk about a toolkit, you talk about how many options there are. You talk about the modularity and extensibility of Disk. It goes hand in hand with a marketplace with, the extension system.

We've built Direct Disk with modularity and extensibility from the ground up. So this is not something we came up with years later. We've truly integrated this into how we thought of the product. You know, if you've heard of our 80 20 rule, we strive to have the core software provide 80% of what you're looking for out of the box. And that other 20% should really be accommodated by not just forking and customizing the open source side, but building extensions and having a really strong developer experience.

And so part of that is us working with the community, to look at, you know, what should the theme be for for a certain month and how can we, reward or help incentivize people to go out and build these amazing extensions, that will end up hopefully in this, in a marketplace. So a few months ago we did a AI themed hackathon which was amazing. I'll I'll talk about a few of those, here in a moment. But, it's worth mentioning that we're in the final week of the current hackathon which is around panels. So our dashboarding system called Insights, is again another modular system.

You can build anything from a time series to a meter to forecasting or anything else. Submit that into this, hackathon and, you know, several $1,000, you know, donations. Just it's a really great program. But going back to our AI, hackathon of, 2 months ago, we have two ways that we sort of, you know, reward the the winners of those of of each hackathon. 1 is a community award, and 1 is our core team, sort of voting on on what we feel is most meaningful.

The community was a really, really amazing one. So this is a AI powered, image processing flow. And what it actually does is it allows you to actually extract text from images or media that gets uploaded to the system in that hook, and also describe, you know, enrich the data with, with metadata from anything that you might upload. So very valuable if you're dealing with a lot of assets, you know, digital asset management system. Just one of the use cases you can power with Directus.

That was the community award. So they got, you know, $1,000 cash and we actually donated $250 to the donation of their choice. And on the core side, our core team actually elected Directus Copilot, which is probably familiar with what Copilot is. That was an insights panel where you could actually use NLP, your natural language processing, to ask questions about your data and get meaningful insights. So just really really cool to see what the community comes up with, you know, off the wall, whatever it might be, submit those.

And, yeah. We'll be taking a look at the the panel submissions, in just about a week. So those are the 5 key aspects of our community. Obviously the guiding light of this entire organization has been since the beginning. I I couldn't be more proud of our core team.

The extension of that being our, you know, additional maintainers and contributors, the global community network that we've built on that has advocated for us and engaged with us across Discord and all these different platforms, not just for Directus, but also for open source, which of course that's what it's what it's all about. So my sincere thank you to everybody in this community, for being a part of this journey. And with that, I'm gonna throw it back to Kevin so we can keep on keeping on. Thanks. Thank you

Speaker 0: so much for that, Ben. I couldn't have said it better myself. All of the care and attention we've made to the insights module that we spoke about earlier today is now available in Directus 10.7 which is available now. Now we're starting to get towards the end of Leap Week, but but don't leave us. We have an amazing further announcement for tomorrow, and I'll see you then.