Appreciating our community in 2019

The end of the year is upon us, and we’re reflecting on a pretty amazing 2019 at DigitalOcean. While we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished as a team, what really excites us is the work we’ve done together with our broader community.

This year alone, more than 27 million developers and aspiring developers visited our Community site to learn, explore, and share knowledge. We created more than 260 original tutorials in English, rewrote 40 to bring them up to the minute, and translated 163 to eight languages other than English.

And you played a huge part in this success. Via our Write for DOnations program, you contributed 146 tutorials as of mid-December. This provided funds to 28 worthy organizations, with a total value of more than $24,000.

You also helped answer more questions than you asked: in our Q&A section, you asked 3,229 questions and posted 6,483 answers. Now that’s a community that cares.

Outside the world of 1s and 0s, we also had the opportunity to connect with many of you in person. Together, we launched The SpinUp with a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund. Alongside Major League Hacking, we created the LocalHost™️ workshop program. Our community also participated in Cornell Tech’s Product Studio, consistently among the top three most popular offers through the GitHub Student Developer Pack. And that’s not to mention the 70 community meetups organized in 17 countries!

We’re also proud of our expanding Hatch community, bringing together some of the world’s most exciting startups. In 2019, we welcomed 2,500 new Hatchers and gave the cap and gown (metaphorically) to 1,500 graduates of the Hatch program.

This was the year we launched our Solutions Partner Program, which has grown to 830 partners representing 55 countries; and our Marketplace – currently home to 125 1-Click Apps from 88 vendors.

 Finally, we expanded our engagement with the open source community. This was our biggest Hacktoberfest ever, with 483,127 pull requests in 154,767 repositories. Developers from 142 countries participated in Hacktoberfest, and 673 in-person Hacktoberfest gatherings took place in 73 countries.

We are proud and grateful to be blessed with such an incredible global community. We’re already looking forward to 2020 and working even more closely with the developer community to encourage learning, growth, and open source.

From all of us at DigitalOcean, have a wonderful holiday season!