January 2021 Summaries

In 2020, the Apache Superset project experienced significant growth and maturity, marked by a 17.7% increase in GitHub stars and a 46.9% rise in pull requests, leading it to rank among the top 200 most popular GitHub projects. The project's diverse contributions saw an increase in pull requests from outside the main supporting organizations, like Preset, Airbnb, Lyft, and Dropbox, from 15% to nearly 30%. The Superset Slack community also grew by 126.2%, yet maintained a stable level of active weekly participants. A key milestone was the project's graduation from the Apache Incubator program, reflecting its development into a mature, meritocratic community. Throughout 2020, Superset underwent multiple design and technical improvements, such as enhanced toolbar navigation, refined database workflows, and improved dashboard aesthetics, which collectively advanced the project's usability and appeal. The project concluded the year with a unified design across its interface, including the SQL Lab and Explore view, setting a strong foundation for future innovations.

Apache Superset 1.0 marks a significant milestone for the open-source data exploration, visualization, and dashboarding application by introducing a host of new features and enhancements aimed at improving usability, design, and security. Originating from a hackathon at Airbnb in 2015, this release addresses accumulated technical and design debt, enhancing user experience through a more polished interface featuring card layouts and redesigned navigation. Moving away from Bootstrap 2x, it adopts Ant Design for a refined design system and shifts CRUD operations to a React-based solution, offering greater modularity and extensibility for engineers. The release also introduces a formalized public REST API and enhances security with commissioned penetration testing and simplified permissions, while improving export/import functionality for easier management and sharing of objects. Superset's community website has been revamped to serve as a central hub for its growing community, and the project has graduated to a top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation, aligning with its governance model. With 1,680 PRs merged and over 25 Superset Improvement Proposals in 2020, the release includes notable improvements such as asynchronous backend enhancements, redesigned toolbars, and new visualization plugins using Echarts, marking its entry into a mature stage and setting the foundation for future advancements.