Robyn's plan for 2023

I believe that the only way to learn the lessons of history is to remember and reflect upon them, for it is through remembering that we gain perspective and insight. Without reflection, we risk repeating our mistakes and missing out on valuable opportunities for growth and progress. In light of this wisdom, it is imperative that we reflect on the past year and analyze the progress made on Robyn. As it is rightly said, Perspective will come in retrospect. Reflecting on the past will help us learn as well as pave the way for the future.

In 2021, when I wrote the blog post Hello, Robyn!, I set out a few technical goals for the project:

• add typing support
• create various plugins (such as for PgSQL and Mongo)
• increase execution speed
• improve documentation
• and invest time in building the community around Robyn.

I am proud to say that within the last year, we have achieved most of these milestones.

As we continued working on the project and while interacting with the fantastic people in the community, we realized that there was still so much more to do. We added more goals to our roadmap:

• improve documentation and educational content
• add speed optimizations
• add OpenAPI integration
• implement Pydantic support
• finalize const requests
• add ORM support (especially Prisma integration)
• improve the plugin ecosystem
• improve WebSockets
• add template support

And I am proud to say that we achieved most of them too. In fact, Robyn has gained a lot of traction in the past year. We have received the support of two companies (Appwrite and Digital Ocean) and two individual sponsors(Shivay Lamba and David Roučka). Additionally, Robyn has crossed 500k installs on PyPi and is about to reach 2k Stars on GitHub. We also made a concerted effort to build a strong community around the project, which paid off in a big way in October 2022, when a few personal events left me overwhelmed. The community stepped forward to keep the project moving. During that time, Robyn was accepted as an open-source project under the MLH Fellowship, and I had started working with the MLH Community. They were an invaluable source of support and guidance. It was then that I truly realized the value of having a community behind the project — I began referring to Robyn as “our” project rather than “my” project.

This experience has only reinforced my belief that a successful open-source project belongs to the community. With this in mind, we are excited to announce that Robyn will be transitioning to a larger open-source organization in the near future. This transition comes to light as we develop Starfyre (a web framework that allows you to write reactive web frontends using Python) and prioritize transparency in decision-making and communication within the community. Additionally, we are proud to have onboarded a maintainer(Antoinne Romero) for the project. We will also be hiring a DevRel intern this year to help us continue growing and supporting the community. More details will be shared soon.

On the technical front, our main goal for 2023 is to release v1.0. In addition, we are planning to:

• add OpenAPI support
• complete Strawberry GraphQL support
• add Pydantic support for data validation
• improve Windows support
• enhance the testing and deployment pipelines
• add support for view controllers
• add first-class support for a database ORM (with Prisma being the current front-runner)
• and continue working on improving the execution speed.
• We also have a surprise ASGI-related goal that we will reveal later. 😉
• But most importantly, we will focus a lot on increasing the educational content around Robyn and making a state of the art documentation.

One aspect that will not change is our commitment to providing an exceptional developer experience. We are dedicated to meeting the needs of our community and are willing to put all our efforts into achieving that. We are particularly passionate about using Rust to create top-notch Python applications so that developers don’t have to worry about the underlying implementation and can focus on building their applications. We will not compromise on this principle and are grateful for the support and guidance from our expanding Robyn community.

Overall, looking back on 2021, the first year of Robyn, it was the year when we chipped a stone and discovered a glimmer of potential. In 2022, we experienced the heat of progress, and in 2023, we plan to fan those flames into a blazing inferno of success. We are grateful for the support and guidance of our growing Robyn community and look forward to continuing to build and strengthen those connections.

You can find more about Robyn at: